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The Roland TR-808 is the most iconic drum machine ever created. Yup – while the 909 came to define house music, the 808 has permeated all genres and styles and has become a true classic instrument. Its booming bass drum, snappy snares, pinging rimshot and piercing claps have been heard in countless records, while countless hardware and software clones – including Roland’s own Boutique recreation – have tried to emulate a piece of the magic.

To celebrate 808 day (that’s the 8th August by the way) we’ve gathered up a selection of over 1,000 808 samples, all for free! You can download them all below for signifcantly cheaper than the real thing.

Music Radar

With a total of 327 808 samples – an instrument that features 12 sounds – this collection may be all you need. Including hits and loops, it’s a bumper pack and it’s totally free. Grab it on the link above.

Goldbaby

Goldbaby is one of the most popular sample makers out there, combining high-end kit with retro lofi processing for powerful sounds and unique textures. He’s also been nice enough to load up his website with a ton of free sounds, including an 808 recorded through a cassette tape, obviously.

Sample Magic

One of the leaders in the sample game, Sample Magic also offer a host of free sounds from classic machines, including the beloved 808. There’s 107 sounds in total so plenty to get your teeth into on this special day.

Wave Alchemy

Wave Alchemy have gone the extra mile and recorded 300 808 samples through a classic Studer tape machine, all for free, with clean and saturated versions of every sound. Nice of them – grab it here.

Paul van Dyk has announced the release of his new studio album, ‘Symbols’.

Set to drop this autumn, the new LP follows his celebrated 2017 release ‘From Then On’ and will be launched with a special headline show at London’s Printworks on 12th October.

Earlier this month, PVD teased the new album with a mysterious tweet. ‘Symbols’ will be the ninth LP from the trance legend who released his debut ‘45 RPM’ in 1994.

In an official statement, van Dyk said, “‘Symbols’ is an album deeply rooted in story-telling, mystery and adventure. It’s an exploration of trance, a journey through the breadth and depth of a genre that continues to enthrall me as an artist.”

‘Symbols’ will be debuted in London’s incredible Printworks venue on 12th October. The recent DJ Mag North America cover star will be the first trance DJ to headline the massive venue since it opened in February 2017.

In July, van Dyk also released the eponymous track from his 2018 SHINE Ibiza residency.

Recently, the German trance luminary took to Twitter to remind fans just how much trance still means to him after nearly three decades in the game. “Trance is more than music,” he wrote. “It’s a lifestyle. It’s about community. It’s emotions turned into sound.”

Swedish House Mafia look set to be going on tour next year after Axwell ^ Ingrosso teased fans at a show in New York City’s Brooklyn Mirage on Memorial Day (28th May)

Toward the end of the set the pair, who form two thirds of Swedish House Mafia, stopped the music and announced that there are indeed gigs lined up for the trio next week.

As can be heard in the video shared below, Axwell said to the crowd, “What do we do now? This is a big move. This has never happened before. Should we cancel the Swedish House Mafia gig we’re planning next year? We are not sure they are ready for Swedish House Mafia in 2019.”

The duo went on to play SHM’s hit ‘Don’t You Worry Child’ as one of the set’s closing tracks while a banner with the trio’s name on it appeared on screen.

Of course, the Swedish House Mafia reformation rumour mill has been up and running for months now. After months of speculation , hints and teasers, the trio reunited at Ultra Music Festival in Miami back in March, claiming, “we’re Swedish House Mafia for good this time”.

Since, the rumours have continued as Axtone Records teased new material from the trio and their social media profile was cleared, suggesting an imminent tour.

With Axwell’s statement the other night though, the rumours do seem to have some truth to them with the possibility of a tour seeming all but confirmed.

The Swedish-born producer and DJ known as Avicii has been found dead in Oman. Publicist Diana Baron said in a statement that the 28-year-old DJ, born Tim Bergling, was in Muscat, Oman. “The family is devastated and we ask everyone to please respect their need for privacy in this difficult time,” the statement said. Avicii was a pioneer of the contemporary Electronic Dance Movement and a rare DJ capable of worldwide arena tours. He won two MTV Music Awards, one Billboard Music Award and earned two Grammy nominations. His biggest hit was “Le7els.” His death comes just days after he was nominated for a Billboard Music Award for top dance/electronic album for his EP “Avicii (01).” He was nominated alongside his peers, who have taken EDM mainstream of late — The Chainsmokers, Calvin Harris and Kygo.

Avicii’s hits include “Wake Me Up!” ”The Days” and “You Make Me.” He is the subject of the 2017 Levan Tsikurishvil documentary “Avicii: True Stories.” Avicii had in the past suffered acute pancreatitis, in part due to excessive drinking. After having his gallbladder and appendix removed in 2014, he canceled a series of shows in attempt to recover. He quit touring in 2016 but continued making music in the studio.

“It’s been a very crazy journey. I started producing when I was 16. I started touring when I was 18. From that point on, I just jumped into 100 percent,” Avicii told Billboard magazine in 2016. “When I look back on my life, I think: whoa, did I do that? It was the best time of my life in a sense. It came with a price – a lot of stress a lot of anxiety for me – but it was the best journey of my life.”

Last year, he posted this message on his website, promising to keep creating: “The next stage will be all about my love of making music to you guys. It is the beginning of something new.”

The first 2018 album from Ron Morelli’s L.I.E.S. label comes from Brooklyn producer Cienfuegos.

Cienfuegos, real name Alex Suarez, came to New York via Miami and has since made a name for himself within Brooklyn’s network of underground clubs. Thus far, he’s put out records and cassettes on labels like BANK Records, Ascetic House, Primitive Languages and Unknown Precept, but the forthcoming L.I.E.S. LP, Autogolpe, is his first full-length on wax.

Autogolpe, the label says, “Is a term for a military coup initiated by a dictator to take control of an existing government. Suarez uses this loose idea to create the sonic equivalent of the pain, strife, oppression, isolation and joyous freedom associated with the act [of overthrow].”

The record is out next month, alongside an EP by Mick Harris under his Fret alias.

A special Record Store Day 12-inch also features former Haçienda residents Mike Pickering and Graeme Park’s first joint remix in 25 years.

Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds will release a remix EP on April 21st for Record Store Day 2018.

The band, led by Oasis member Gallagher, tapped Andrew Weatherall for one of the remixes of their track “It’s A Beautiful World.” They also commissioned one from Mike Pickering and Graeme Park, former residents at legendary Manchester nightclub The Haçienda—it’s their first collaborative remix in 25 years. A vocal and dub version of each rework will appear on the 12-inch, which will come as a limited promotional release on Gallagher’s label Sour Mash Records.

“I love Record Store Day,” Gallagher says. “It gives us, the artists, a chance to put music out there that otherwise might never see the light of day.”

You can hear the Weatherall remix at around 1:55:00 in this recording from NTS Radio.

The iconic trance and EDM party launched at the San Rafael super club in 1995.

Legendary trance and EDM night Cream Ibiza is leaving Amnesia after 23 years.

Reasons for the move are currently unknown, though several sources, including a Cream resident, have confirmed the news. It’s also unclear whether Cream will leave the island for good or switch to another venue. Launched at Amnesia in 1995, the party soon became one of the island’s biggest draws, with Fatboy Slim, Calvin Harris and Paul Van Dyk among the regular guests.

Cream follows another long-running Amnesia staple, Cocoon, out the door. After 18 years, Sven Väth and friends are taking over Wednesdays at Pacha instead.

Mutant Beat Dance will release a self-titled album via Rush Hour in spring.

The 25-track, 200-minute album has been in the works since 2015 and will be released by the Dutch label as a “record album booklet” with six records of varying formats—namely a 12-inch, 10-inch and 7-inch. The group’s founding members, Traxx and Beau Wanzer, brought Steve Summers into the fold for the band’s debut LP. Rush Hour says the record includes “funky grooves, industrial soundscapes, nu age dancehouze, prototype disco dub, Detroit dirge, cryptic ankle bitter anthems and even a punk cover collaborating with members of LCD Soundsystem.”

Traxx, real name Melvin Oliphant, recently provided DJ support for LCD on a North American tour. Wanzer has been prolific in recent years, releasing a steady stream of albums and singles. Letkiewicz, who has recently joined Wanzer and Oliphant as a Chicago resident, released three Steve Summers 12-inches last year. Mutant Beat Dance’s new album follows EPs for Discos Capablanca, Rong Music, L.I.E.S. and Rush Hour.

Roland have released a new drum machine, the TR8S. An update to their popular hardware, they’ve added some extra performance features including an SD card to load your own samples, extra sounds and kits beyond Roland’s own legacy kit and a Motion sequencer to record and sequence changes and movements in sound and tone.

The new screen allows users to dive in and edit sounds and effects and a new Performance Pad allows you to enter velocity sensitive patterns or play sounds more realistically. The SD card can also store whole kits, patterns and settings so you can take your SD on the road rather than the whole unit, or for any studio disasters.

The new CTRL knob on every sound can be assigned to various parameters including Attack amount, Delay send, LFO depth and more, depending on the kit. Users can also change it independently for each sample or globally so each sound is affected the same way.

Kits include the classic 808, 909 and so on from the TR8, but have added more genre-based styles and sounds, as well as allowing users to edit and save kits, or combine sounds from multiple kits into their own custom one. Thankfully, you no longer have to settle for multiple outputs via the built-in USB – the TR8S features eight physical quarter-inch jacks out that can be assigned to any sound, or combined as a stereo pair. Interestingly, they can also be used as trigger outs to use with other hardware, and there’s even a 3.5mm trigger to go straight into Roland’s Boutique range. The stereo quarter-inch external input allows everything to run back through the TR8S, as well as through its FX section.

It’s a hefty update that brings what was a drum machine that was popular but limited in sound into a completely new space, keeping the popular performance faders and Tune and Decay per sound but adding kits, features and functions to rival more comprehensive kit. All the better, at €699, Roland have managed to keep the cost low. The TR8S will be available in April 2018.

Ultra Worldwide has announced the return of its Resistance concept to Mexico City in 2018. The underground techno, tech-house and house focused event returns as a standalone festival from the 25th – 27th May at Club De Golf in Teotihuacán.

Resistance made its Mexico City debut in 2017 as part of the larger Ultra Mexico City festival. Resistance Mexico City 2018 is the concept’s first foray into a standalone three-day festival and arrives as Ultra celebrates its 20th anniversary.

Since its debut, various Resistance events have been curated in Shanghai, Tokyo, the UK, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Chile, Ibiza, Lima along with the seminal Miami festival.

Jon Hopkins has shared some stunning new music as part of a brand new trailer.

The inimitable electronic producer, whose most recent LP ‘Immunity’ was released in 2013, shared the trailer through his social media channels this morning (23rd February).

“I’m so happy to share some brand new music with you,” the accompanying text reads. “There is much more news to come soon, but this is where it begins. If you can, please watch in HD, with full screen and on headphones.”

Known for his impeccable blending of electronica, contemporary classical and techno, the new music teased in this four-minute clip is a typically breathtaking serving of ambient bass textures and melodic soundscapes. The accompanying video, directed by Stephen McNally in association with Blink Industries, is an equally hypnotic affair.

In September 2017, the Mercury nominated producer and composer who has made soundtracks for films like How I Live Now and collaborated with the likes of David Byrne, Brian Eno and King Creosote, tweeted “The record is nearly fucking finished”.

With today’s trailer, and with slots lined up at festivals like Dimensions and Wilderness this summer, we have a feeling it’s about time to get very excited for the return of one of the UK’s most important producers.

Carl Cox is one of the world’s most respected DJs — but what is often overlooked is in the early ‘90s he was one of the biggest names in the UK hardcore rave scene.

As a tribute to his long-forgotten penchant for the insane BPMs and genre-defying mixes, American DJ Pearsall — who now resides in Berlin — has recorded a mix that shines a light on the music Coxy was championing between 1993 and 1994.

Pearsall has successfully tried to mimic Cox’s long-forgotten style where the three deck Jedi would mix Dutch gabber with Scottish bouncy techno and everything in between for some truly eclectic sets in the early ‘90s.

“I wanted to boil down two years worth of his musical selections into a single mix, with nice and crisp audio quality and no shitty mc’s,” said Pearsall on the mix’s creation.

“To do so, I built a database of 25 tracklistings from 1993/1994 and pulled together a tracklisting of 45 tunes that captures all of the elements of the Carl Cox rave experience.”

The mix was recorded in Pearsall’s adopted hometown using 100% vinyl — just the way Coxy likes it.

Cox recently announced that he will be playing a fundraiser in San Francisco to raise money for his annual Burning Man stage production.

As time goes on, Leif Knowles continually refines the lush and psychedelic sound that’s very much his own. For an idea of where he’s at as a DJ, listen to his set from last year at Freerotation, where he’s a resident. For his best productions, it’s a toss-up between July V / Shoulders Back, the first 10-inch on his Tio Series, and its follow-up, Bluebird / Number 13.

Trippy as they are, both tracks are playful and somehow innocent—rather than a lurid afterhour, you might imagine, say, a festive gathering of adorable forest spirits (or maybe that’s just me). Despite its high tempo (138 BPM), “Bluebird” rides a lazy, seesawing groove, its twinkling melody framed by percussion that shimmers with delay. “Number 13” moves with a bubbling motion, its bassline gurgling up like a hot spring. As with “Bluebird,” the lead is a winding 16th-note melody, but this one clones itself in a repeating pattern of call-and-response, first in a higher octave, then with a more percussive sound in the lower mid-range. Both are defined by dazzling textures and nimble rhythms, a combination at the heart of most of Knowles’ music, but that here feels closer than ever to perfection.

Takaaki Itoh’s Disciplinary Synthetics EP has a nifty balance between new and old school sounds. There’s the deep and psychedelic side of tracks like “Wisher” and “Obliger,” modern-sounding techno tunes that would hypnotise a dance floor. Then there’s “Anagrammer,” a blistering weapon that couples the rawness of ’90s UK techno with precision percussion and a well-sculpted low-end. It’s no surprise that Itoh can blend eras and sounds so naturally: he’s been producing for over 20 years.

The EP’s highlight, “Wisher,” was picked up by plenty of DJs, and is among RA’s most-charted tracks of January. A fairly standard but effective tool, its kick drum sets a steady pace among a collage of synths that whir and bleep. The sound will be familiar to followers of Northern Electronics and Semantica Records, labels that favour depth over immediacy. While the syncopated “Obliger” hovers in a similar zone, the stomping “Anagrammer” is more forceful, channelling golden-era Birmingham techno with its elastic lead synth. Funky and ice-cold, it recalls the intensity of early Regis tracks like “Allies” and “Sand.” Thanks to a balance between old and new, Disciplinary Synthetics nails a timeless—albeit familiar—aesthetic.

The three-day event, which takes place in the southern Italian region of Apulia from July 27th through 29th, has locked in the likes of Carl Craig, Elena Colombi, John Talabot, Mano Le Tough and Gerd Janson for its second year. Resident Advisor will curate a stage at the festival for the first time, which will run on the Friday and Saturday nights and host Phase Fatale, Freddy K, Dino Sabatini, Job Jobse, Dona, Yanik Park and Z.I.P.P.O.

Polifonic has also organised a warmup party featuring DJ Koze, Hiver and Futuro Tropicale, which takes place on April 19th at a Teatro Principe in Milan.

Tickets for the warmup and festival go on sale on RA at 12 PM CET on Wednesday, February 14th.

Ever since the revelations in Hollywood about film producer Harvey Weinstein, and the subsequent #MeToo stories of sexual misconduct, the dance music world has been waiting for tales from our scene to come to light. And it seems that there are plenty. The following accounts are from women in our scene who have been harassed, abused or bullied by men taking liberties — without their consent. Names have been kept out of the accounts for obvious reasons. A helpline has been launched specifically for the electronic dance music industry, details are at the bottom of the page…

THE DJ“To be honest, it’s easier to come up with a time something sexist DIDN’T happen. There are so many instances I don’t know where to start really. As well as the big ones that are nasty and dangerous, there is the constant small ones. Like a sort of background noise that is always there. Being quizzed all the time. Being talked over. Pressure to be glam. As if how you look has anything to do with what comes out of the speakers.

“There are different types of pressures for different jobs in the industry. I think female agents and managers have to be, like, ten times more aggressive and hard than men, and some have told me it is horrible for them ‘cos it isn’t really how they are. Or want to work, ideally. And of course if you are tough and a woman you are a ‘bitch’ — and worse. But if it is a man you are just good at your job. Look at “I will bite you” manager. Bet he got a pat on the back for all that.

“I once arrived at a gig and it was one of the early days in my career of air travel being a novelty, so also a little scary in itself. We don’t all get minders and tour managers. You are a long way from home, arriving in the middle of the night. So I got through customs and the promoter is there and he is really standing out in, like, sunglasses at midnight, and you can see before he even opens his trap that he loves himself. Some people only interact with you in ‘come-on’ mode. This was one. From the get-go he is turning on the charm. Clearly on drugs, too. And you know, it’s late and you’ve already done a thousand miles and a gig the night before…

“So in the car he is making loads of innuendo, and it is hard to know what to do cos if you are too cold men can get aggressive and it is even riskier to pretend to respond, so you are in this sort of limbo of ‘yes’ and ‘no’ answers and ‘uh-huh’ and ‘mmm’, and trying to sound like you are listening but also project disinterest. I think all women know what I am talking about. I won’t repeat what he was coming out with but it was not very nice. And it is scary on a motorway at night with no other cars about.

“By the time we get into town he keeps talking about what a good time I am going to have, and you just want to say, ‘Look, I’m here to work, mate’, and then he starts asking personal questions like if I am married and all that, and you are like, ‘Oh lord, he we go!’ So the first direct proposition is in the car. A really shit one too, like ‘How about it?’ and waggling eyebrows like he’s 15 or something. So you just laugh it off. What else can you do? This is the person who is supposed to be paying you, your ‘employer’.

“So instead of dropping me and picking me up, he is ‘helping me check-in’. As if any decent hotel doesn’t have multi-lingual staff. Then he’s ‘helping with the bags’. So then I get to the lift and it starts to get real. It’s a confined space and he is staring me out. Then he presses the emergency stop, and I just go rigid. I couldn’t even tell you what he was saying, I was so petrified, but it was a variation of the earlier come-on. I started pressing buttons on the lift and that seemed to break the tension, so he started it up again. In hindsight he knew them buttons too well. He’d done it before.

“Then he tried it on again outside the door. Saying how he’d booked me because he’d fallen in love with me. Basically, booking me because of photographs. I was in bits by this point. Couldn’t get in the room fast enough, and slammed the door in his face. Been propositioned three times before I’d even got in the hotel room. Had to be some sort of record. Can you imagine how you feel as a performer that you’ve basically just been told what you do is irrelevant, all that matters is what you look like?

“Luckily someone else came to pick me up. My confidence was shot by this point. I played like shit that night. What kind of professional hammers an artist’s confidence like that and then expects them to deliver? He ran the night with this business partner who did the journey to the gig from the hotel. I just said as diplomatically as I could, ‘I ain’t getting in a car with your mate again’, and he just laughed, like ‘Oh yeah, he is a bit of a lad that one’. This is the real problem right there. Acceptance.

“One last thing. I can’t stand ‘female DJ’ — we are just DJs thanks.”

THE PARISIENNE
“I used to go out alone in clubs for many years. I really like moving from club to club to hear some artists, and to be free if I decide to go home. My legendary frosty behaviour in clubs helps me a lot to feel safe, to always keep the control of some situations. Just in case. I always play it safe.

“I had to go to work in Lyon to take some pics (live and portraits) of a famous Brazilian DJ, who is part of a big record label. I missed this DJ two days before in Marseille, he was playing in a club where I knew the promoters. The deal was that he had to pay my train tickets and my hotel in Lyon.

“I met him then on a boat with his manager, he was running late and had to perform live 15 minutes after. In this boat I met some very nice people (boys and girls) from Lyon, who gave me their phone numbers if I wanted to join them in an after-party. After the live show, the promoter told us to leave the venue very quickly, and as there was no backstage area I couldn’t take my pics there. The DJ asked me to go with them to the hotel for some portrait shots instead.

“We arrived at the hotel, and despite the deal, they said that they wouldn’t pay for a room for me now. Also, the hotel was suddenly full. I was quite angry, then the DJ asked me to stay with his manager for half an hour in his room because he had to be alone to make a Skype call with his wife first, and after that he would find a solution.

“I shouldn’t have come to his room. I guess the actresses felt the same too for Weinstein. And that’s what people (other DJs) told me. Because yes, it’s ALWAYS our fault. But when you are here for WORK, and when the guys knew I’ve already taken some pics of other DJs from their label, how I could imagine that the manager would try to rape me?

“I was very lucky because the other rooms heard me screaming. Screaming ‘NO!’. A lot of times. ‘NO!’. ‘STOP!’.

“I thank all the other rooms who called reception. I thank the receptionist of the hotel to have called the room and taken action. And I thank the kind local man I met earlier on the boat to have come five minutes later after my call to bring me to a safe place. I was in shock, I cried and had an anxiety attack all night long.

“I’ve never published the pics of the gig. I don’t ever want to see them again.”

THE SOUL SISTER
“I knew this DJ a while as he has been part of the scene since the start, as he likes to tell everyone at any opportunity. He was accused of rape formally and had a really awful rep before that too, but I just didn’t believe it — especially when he got off the charge. It’s easy with hindsight, but none of my friends or family liked him and I spent quite a bit of time with him until I finally stepped away. I paid for nearly everything when we were together. Something I hear happened to the others. I now know there are many others he abused like me.

“The police are almost powerless with ‘conjugal rape’. That is his thing. The others and myself were fooled into a relationship, and gradually the violence and perversity are upped and upped. I won’t go too much into the details of what he does, but suffice to say it is not consensual.

“I have made numerous complaints to the police regarding him. They have assured me if I made a complaint about his sexual preference they would take me seriously and investigate. I haven’t done this mainly as it means I will have to put myself through more trauma and I just want to forget I was even with him, to be honest. I am in a new relationship now and although my boyfriend has promised me if I want to he will support me, I am not sure I am able to handle the stress at the moment. After all, he got away with it before so often.

“We all have troubled relationships, but it is what happens after that makes it even worse. He has such a terrible reputation and is so paranoid that he spends most of his time stalking Facebook and Twitter to see what people are saying about him. His whole life is wrapped up in that keyboard — thinking everyone is out to get him. This was long before he crumbled and made everyone aware that he is very unhinged.

“He was always blaming the women before me — I was too blind to see the signs. When we were together he made me block my friends and people in the industry who were ‘against’ him. It was so embarrassing. They never asked me to work with them again, which was awful.

“He has had fake social media accounts and uses them to monitor and threaten people. He also has spent the last few years slagging me off and telling lies about me all over social media and to anyone who wanted to listen. He uses his dwindling fame and small gang of fans to outnumber and surround victims. Abusing his position. I worked in the biz myself a bit, but afterwards he blackened my name with anyone he could. In my normal job he got the police to call my work to give me a ‘harassment warning’. How he kept finding me I don’t know. But stalking is illegal. This is after police gave him a verbal warning about his abuse over social media regarding me.

“He is a manipulative narcissistic bully who has got away with it for too long. I’m doing this [speaking out] so one day others will know, and be able to steer clear of him.”

THE ARTIST MANAGER
“These days I’m an artist manager in the electronic music scene, but I was 20 years old in 2001 when the incident took place in my hometown. At the time I was a raver and hung out with various people in the scene. I loved to go out, and I loved my music.

“The night in question was a week-night and I had a funeral to go to the next day, the funeral of a close family friend — and I got wasted. I had an aversion to funerals and was always good at missing them. I went out on a mission to get drunk. I was out with some friends in one of the local clubs, and I was sad but wild. I remember lining up shots and drinking at least four at a time for quite a while. When the club was closing he was there, and he asked a male friend and I back to his apartment. My friend changed his mind at the last minute and I went back.

“I’d met the perpetrator a handful of times before, and he was on the scene. He was a friend of a friend, about 15 years older than me, and I thought he was a regular nice guy. I wasn’t attracted to him and didn’t flirt or give any signals. I was out getting drunk with friends.

“I thought I was in safe hands when I went back with him. I just didn’t want to go home — as that meant the reality of the funeral in the morning would kick in — and we didn’t live that far apart. I trusted him.

“I remember listening to some music in the living room and feeling cold. He gave me a hoodie to keep warm and we were chatting away. I remember feeling tired and very, very drunk. He got out some Tamazepan, gave me a whole one to take, and that’s the last I remember.

“I will never forget how cold I felt when I opened my eyes in the morning. The light was creeping through the edge of the blinds, and I had no idea where I was. I didn’t know what had happened and I felt sick thinking about what could have happened — I felt ashamed. I was half-naked, and he was there next to me in his bed. I wish I could remember but I’m glad I wasn’t conscious — does that make sense? I had been sexually assaulted whilst unconscious by a man I thought I could trust.

“He hardly said a word to me in the morning — it was awful. He got up, got dressed, left the house and said I could let myself out. I didn’t even know where I was. I have always tried to forget what happened that night, and to some extent I did forget as it was easier that way.

“I like to think this experience had no impact on me because I spent so much time pretending it never happened. I went off the rails and drank a lot. I told some of my friends about it and they were great, they supported me, but it wasn’t the norm to report it or go to the police.

“My feelings turned to anger for a while when the guy turned up to a party at my house (my flatmate had unwittingly invited him) with his new girlfriend — the girlfriend who a few months later shouted at me because she said she knew that we had slept together! Six months or so later at a house party a mutual friend of ours made some joke about me and ‘him’. I flew off the handle and told everyone in the room what happened — they were shocked but the funny thing is nobody told me to report it, nobody called him out on it. In those days it wasn’t the done thing.

“Today I feel sad about it, and still a little ashamed. He’s now a tour manager for one of the UK’s most well-known DJs and from time to time I bump into him at gigs or events — the best you will get from me is an exchange of pleasantries. I hope that my silence all those years ago has not meant that others have suffered at his hands. I am talking about this today because it’s NOT OKAY for anybody to prey on the vulnerable and take advantage of somebody under the influence of alcohol or drugs.”

THE PHOTOGRAPHER
“I’m a photographer that has specialised in shooting electronic music for the past ten years. Most notably I worked in Fabric from 2006 until 2017. My experiences mainly fall under the dubstep genre.

“In 2013, when I first started working for the person who wronged me, it was great. I was quite proud to work for his label as I really believed in its ethos and the music it produced. Working with this man was fairly easy to start with.

“This artist is well known to be an extreme womaniser, although I didn’t know it at the time as I went into this scene totally blind. What you have to remember is that artists are in a different world, they are given everything they want. In some cases it doesn’t change a person, but others become entitled — and this also applies to the treatment of women.

“As a female that worked for him I got thrown into that mix, unfortunately. There is an expectation around women in the industry that we are available, because — let’s face it — some are. When you are used to women saying yes and believe that’s how it should go and you also manipulate women, that is misogyny and entitlement. So I would say yes, this artist had an assumption that you are there to cater to him by whatever means he sees fit — and he will do anything to get what he wants.

“I very nearly fell for the manipulating — embarrassingly so, I might add. I was nearly played, and in the end I cut off contact. If you sleep with this guy, you will be left alone to progress in your career. As I did not and left the label, it became clear that that was expected of me — otherwise he wouldn’t have got so angry after I walked away, he just wouldn’t have cared.

“I wasn’t aware of anything afterwards for a long time and went about my business for a year or so, but then some odd things happened. I lost a large show with a well-known brand — in fact, they rarely employed me again after that. I was gaslighted by a lot of artists I had worked for in the years previously, as a lot of them never supported me ever again — some even ran away from me at events. I knew something was up, but it was so under the radar I couldn’t prove anything. There was a massive shift in the way I was treated by a whole group of people around this guy — maybe 15-20 people in total.

“Some people in the scene confirmed to me that this was the modus operandi of this artist. He was known to ostracise girls out of the whole scene by smearing their characters and reputation. Some people confirmed it did happen to me later on, which was devastating. Even though this was common knowledge and a regular pattern of behaviour for this guy, nobody helped me or even talked to me about it all. A few very good people did see what was happening and tried to fix it, but to no avail. It’s a very insidious form of bullying.

“His character assassination was severe, as people who had never even met me treated me in a cold way. I also sent a lot of emails to gain work but never received any answer back — it was clear I was being cold-shouldered. The shift of attitude between how welcoming people were before to after was massive.

“After I stopped working for him, he harassed me at a number of events. He chased me out of a tent at a festival in 2015, he got me removed from the pit at a festival in Croatia, and at another event he accused my boyfriend at the time — who was a sound engineer — of sabotaging his set. As far as the bullying goes, this kind of dynamic plays out in all workplaces across the world, but as music is unregulated nothing is done. This kind of bullying is called mobbing, it’s a very nasty business indeed.

“This artist smearing me has affected my work to a huge degree. It’s also rather scary when someone tries to intimidate you out of places where you are minding your own business. In the end, to actually speak up honestly about issues and how this industry works, I have had to step out of it. This is a ten-year career I just firebranded to speak the truth. So it’s pretty career-ending this kind of thing, very Weinstein-like.

“I have been accused of being a fantasist. The fact that a lot of my work is low-paid and I do it for the love of music has been mocked, and many artists who I respected and wanted to capture through my images have stabbed me in the back. This is all from one issue with one artist in over a decade of work. Yet this artist has a history of terrible behaviour and he is believed — it is, in reality, a cult-like dynamic.

“The treatment of women in this industry and society as a whole needs to be overhauled. The age of the boys club is over. We are going through a purge in the entertainment industry, and it needs to be done.

“I hope I get an apology, although I doubt that will come. The thing is, this artist is hugely talented and this kind of behaviour hurts himself. If you act out and treat people badly, this industry is small and word does get around. Music is teamwork. Men like him with narcissistic/sociopathic and ego-based traits do treat women like this — to them you are an object to serve. It’s toxic masculinity made worse by the excesses of drugs and the fame lifestyle, coupled with personality traits.”

If you have been affected by any of the issues raised in this article, a helpline number has been launched specifically for the electronic dance music industry. Funded by DJ Mag, the Association For Electronic Muisc (AFEM) and others, the helpline is being operated by workplace health organisation Health Assured and staffed by trained experts.
The number to call is 0800 030 5182.

Ibiza business owners have gathered to speak out against San Antonio council’s decision to implement earlier closing times for clubs in the area.

The 60 gathered businessess have said that for the local council to enforce a law that see clubs closing several hours earlier than previously would be at the cost of jobs for many. As reported in Diario De Ibiza, club owners have said that such a law could be a “death sentence for many families and small businesses”.

They went on to say that “closure of businesses, the shortening of the tourist season to just one month and the direct loss of more than 300 jobs”. This new law would see outdoor terrace bars having to shut by 11pm and clubs in the area having to close by 3am as opposed to 5 or 6am in the summer.

The new regulation, is just one of the ways in which local Ibiza councils have aimed to reduce noise polution on the island, with decible restrictions being implemented in venues in San Antonio since last October.

In their statement, businesses who will affected by the new closure times said that this law can only be a “temporary solution” and is not a realistic fix to any problem. “[This law] has no precedent in similar tourist zones in Spain,” they said. “Not even orders approved by the local governments of Manuela Carmena (Madrid council) or Ada Colau (Barcelona council) are this strict.. once our businesses are shut for the night, will force the party to move down to the beaches or to nearby streets. The problem will only be displaced, not properly dealt with.”

Along wth their statement, the business owners (who not only include club owners but also owners of bars and shops) suggested alternative measures that would help combat noise pollution, inclunding increasing security and more stricty adhereing to soundproofing standards previously imposed by the council.

This is by no means the first action to be taken by Ibiza councils in wake of challenges brought by the island’s huge tourist sector. For instance, short term accommodation through platforms like Airbnb will be severely restricted in Ibiza this year. One law implemented last year sought to limit the number of tourists that visit the island altogether while, on the positive side, disposable plastics will be completely banned from the island’s beaches from 2020.

Clearly, the concept of copyright doesn’t really exist in China as a nightclub sporting the same name and logo as famed London nightclub fabric has been spotted operating in the country.

The club was spotted by a Dutch DJ and promoter Bram van Ravenhorst who runs Chongqing club Echo Bay and took some pictures of the club’s exterior, sporting fabric’s iconic logo, which have since gone viral.

The club is located in the Beibin Lu area of downtown Chongqing and clearly is trying to cash in on fabric’s world-renowned brand.

It gets worse though — the club was recently reviewed by Time Out China and received a less-than-glowing review due to the fact it mainly plays EDM and features scantily clad dancers, both of which you don’t get at the real Fabric.

Whilst imitation is the highest form of flattery, it’s clear that London’s fabric probably won’t be too happy about its unofficial Chinese doppelgänger and will most likely be exploring ways to get the club to change its name and stop using their logo and branding.

Last week, the real fabric launched a new fortnightly event series in early 2018 dubbed Forms, with Skream headlining the series’ debut party on 19th January.

The streaming wars are warming up with the revelation that Apple Music has overtaken Spotify in the US, the biggest music streaming market in the world.

But don’t be fooled though, Spotify still has almost double the number of subscribers and is still the leading streaming service in several other major regions, including Europe.

According to the WSJ, Apple Music — which only launched a couple of years ago — has seen a huge increase in users, partly due to the fact it’s been preloaded on every iPhone sold since Apple bought Beats from Dr Dre for $3 billion.

It’s far from game over for Spotify, the ability to have the Swedish streaming service on a myriad of TVs, wireless speakers, game consoles and Android phones is still a major reason why many music fans choose it over Apple Music — and that’s not going to change anytime soon.

Apple does hope that with the release of its heavily delayed HomePod speaker range next week it will strengthen its streaming offering in this department.

Sasha & John Digweed have announced that they will headline a show in Belfast’s Custom House Square on August 18th as part of their RESISTANCE world tour.

The widely respected progressive house duo will be joined by and Nic Fanciulli and Psycatron on the night. The pair reunited at The Social Festival 2016 after a six year break during which they persued solo work. Since, they have been as in-demand and as innovative as ever. In 2017, they had their own RESISTANCE residency in the iconic Privilege venue in Ibiza. The former DJ Mag Ibiza cover stars also embarked on their RESISTANCE world tour with Ultra last year, playing at festivals like Glastonbury, Kappa Futur Festival (Turin) and Veld Music Festival (Toronto).

Tickets for their show in Belfast will go on sale this Friday February 9th at 9am GMT via Ticketmaster.

It’s shaping up to be a pretty amazing summer for dance music in Belfast with AVA festival and conference’s line-up for June also looking superb.

To give yourself an idea of just how special a gig this will be, read our 11 moments that defined Sasha & John Digweed here.

Carl Cox will be playing at San Francisco’s Midway on 30th March in order to raise funds for his annual Playground camp at this year’s Burning Man festival.

Coxy has been playing the iconic festival for over a decade and along with his own rise in popularity, his Playground camp has quickly become one of the festival’s many highlights.

For his fundraising show in San Francisco, Coxy will be performing alongside Joseph Capriati, Syd Gris, Brennen Grey, Rooz, Kramer, Tamo and Paul Skinback.

According to the press release, Burning Man represents a special place for the former Space resident and he hopes that with the money raised he’ll be able to create an incredible stage production for this year’s Burn.

“Carl started his Playground camp as a way to celebrate all that Burning Man is and as a way to give back to a culture that he loves,” the press release reads. “It started small and most who landed in the camp that first year were those just passing by to get someplace else, but the music and vibe pulled them in.

“From that humble start, it has steadily grown over the years and in a very organic way because the energy, music and people are what makes Playground so special.”

In other Burning Man news, the festival’s organisers have warned fans to be wary of a ticket scam which has targeted Fyre Festival attendees who, let’s face it, have suffered enough.

Calvin Harris was interviewed by Zane Lowe for Beats 1 Radio on Thursday 8th February. In his second candid interview of the week after an equally revealing one with Annie Mac on BBC1, the Scottish star producer further discussed his complicated relationship with EDM, preferring his Las Vegas shows to festivals, money being “the root of all evil” and collaborating with Canadian artist PartyNextDoor.

Yesterday, Harris dropped his new single feat. PartyNextDoor ‘Nuh Ready, Nuh Ready’, a smooth, dancehall number that finds the producer working his way gradually back into the dancier moods that he consciously stepped away from in 2017.

When he released ‘Funk Wav Bounces’, it felt like Harris was done with EDM altogether – he told Annie Mac that when he released ‘My Way’ in December 2016 he had “never felt so unexcited by what I was putting out in my life”. However, after releasing an album that moved entirely away from EDM and which featured the likes of Frank Ocean, Travis Scott and Nicki Minaj, it seems he has since reconciled his relationship with the genre.

“I basically took a year off dance music when I did all the Funk stuff,” he said. “I thought I didn’t like it anymore…I was like wait, wait, wait. So actually some of the best producers in the world are EDM producers, even though they got shit on by everybody, the critics and cool music lovers. I’m sorry, but some of the best producers in the world are EDM and some of the best producers are Dutch.”

That being said, in his interview with Mac, Harris appeared ultimately concerned with making the music he wants to make and using the money he makes from his Las Vegas residency to collaborate with the artists he wants to work with, whether it’s “commercially viable” or not, saying, “I’m just going to out out tunes that I love”.

Speaking to Zane Lowe, Harris also talked about how much he is enjoying his residency in Las Vegas compared to playing larger festivals.

“All that stuff got a little bit too impersonal,” he told Lowe. “Standing up there and it’s the fireworks and all that stuff, but you’ve got no connection with anyone. And that’s why I actually love playing Vegas at the moment because I get to see people’s faces and get to see people enjoy their night. Those big festival shows which I wasn’t getting into personally other than a bit of money and money is, you know, the root of all evil.”

He went on to discuss how he prefers working and collaborating in the studio more than anything though. “I want to spend more time in studio and it’s been that way for a couple of years,” he explained. “I haven’t done any meaningful festivals for years. Almost did one but I didn’t announce it because that’s the sort of guy I am. And also because I really might want to go back.”

In discussing his collaboration with PartyNextDoor, he said, “I thought he was a genius for a few years. The thing is, I feel now more than ever, if you don’t come out acting like a genius then you don’t get called a genius. And because he’s to the outside a very reserved and very like just off limits, you don’t know what he is; you don’t know what he’s like.”

In his interview with Annie Mac, he talked about wanting to highlight his love of other styles of music that people wouldn’t necessarily know he’s into…

“I wanted to do something with skippy drums,” he said. “People don’t know that I love that stuff. Unless they know me they don’t know that I’m obsessed with speed garage. I want people to know.”

Harris seems to be set for another big year in 2018 (and beyond) with his Las Vegas residency being extended to 2020 and being worth £200 million. In January he purchased Steve Angello’s LA mansion while last October he donated his booking fee for nightclub Omnia to the victims of the Las Vegas shooting.

You can listen to ‘Nuh Ready, Nuh Ready’ below. Listen to the interview with Zane Lowe here Annie Mac here.

Faithless have been announced for a DJ set at Creamfields Steel Yard London weekender on Sunday 27th May.

The iconic UK electronica outfit will join headliners Tiësto and Steve Angello in Finsbury Park as part of the Steel Yard’s second London edition. Tchami and Malaa have also announced the UK debut of their new ‘No Redemption’ live show for the Sunday.

Last year, during the superstrucutre’s innaugeral London outing, 15,000 people attended each day. Trance legends Above & Beyond will open the weekend’s proceedings on Saturday 26th in what will be their biggest UK show to date. You can watch our rcent in-depth interview with them here.

While the Steel Yard itself was initially built to be an exclusive fixture of Creamfields Fsetival, it has since gone on to host massive events in Liverpool and London. Faithless reformed after a four year hiatus in 2015. Yesterday it was announced that they would DJ alongside Basement Jaxx at Aberdeen’s Enjoy Music festival in June.

Around 60 business owners in Ibiza’s popular tourist zone the West End have spoken out against plans to implement earlier closing times, calling them a “death sentence for many families and small businesses.”

In a statement seen by Diario De Ibiza, the group has called on San Antonio council to rethink the proposed laws, which would reduce closing times for outdoor bar terraces to 11 PM, and for bars, restaurants and clubs to 3 AM. They say the changes could result in the “closure of businesses, the shortening of the tourist season to just one month and the direct loss of more than 300 jobs.”

The statement goes on to say that the law “has no precedent in similar tourist zones in Spain. Not even orders approved by the local governments of Manuela Carmena (Madrid council) or Ada Colau (Barcelona council) are this strict. Let’s be clear that this is nothing more than a temporary solution, which, once our businesses are shut for the night, will force the party to move down to the beaches or to nearby streets. The problem will only be displaced, not properly dealt with.”

In an attempt to further convince San Antonio council, the group outlined a series of measures they’d enact to help combat noise pollution, including stepping up security in the area and fully complying with the soundproofing rules imposed by the council.

Reducing closing times is just one of the changes proposed by the new laws, which will go to a vote before the municipal plenary this month. If ratified, the area that’s home to the West End will officially become a Special Acoustic Protection Zone (ZPAE).

The current proposals have been called “the most important copyright reforms of the last 20 years in Europe.”

Jean-Michel Jarre has signed an open letter to European Parliament backing amendments to copyright law.

Jarre is the president of CISAC, an international conglomerate of performing rights organisations aiming to close copyright loopholes in a directive currently being drafted by the European Parliament. The aim is to strengthen the position of copyright holders negotiating licensing deals with large-scale digital platforms like YouTube and Spotify. The current law allows streaming services to pay lower royalties in the EU than other territories, which the CISAC has called “a major problem… holding back our sector and jeopardising future sustainability.”

The open letter deems the current proposals “the most important copyright reforms of the last 20 years in Europe.” The letter continues: “Europe now has a chance to address the ‘transfer of value’ or ‘value gap’ which is caused by loopholes in the law allowing some of the world’s largest digital platforms to deny fair remuneration to millions of creators. To do this effectively, it is essential for the legislation to ensure fair remuneration by user uploaded content platforms such as YouTube. EU law should not be a shield to allow such platforms to make vast revenues from creative works while not fairly rewarding the creators.”

In the world of hardware effect processors, few names can match Eventide’s acclaim. Going back all the way to the ’70s, their Instant Phaser and H910 Harmonizer generated groundbreaking sounds on albums like David Bowie’s Low. They also covered utilitarian applications like correcting the pitch of TV shows that had been sped up to allow more time for commercials. Many of their most well-received effects were developed back in the days when RAM had just been invented, so it’s no exaggeration to say that Eventide was a pioneer in digital audio effects. The innovation continues today with high-end units like the mammoth H8000FW rack effects processor, which remains one of the most lust-worthy hardware units on the market 12 years after it was first introduced.

When it comes to software, Eventide first embraced the Pro Tools TDM format. Back in 2003, they released Clockworks Legacy, their first ever TDM plug-in bundle, which included the H910 and H949 Harmonizers, a sophisticated compressor called Omnipresso and the classic Instant Phaser and Instant Flanger units. Over the next three years they continued to add new TDM plug-ins to the suite, rebranding it as the more impressive-sounding Anthology bundle. As the computing world evolved, the desire for TDM plug-ins waned, and in late 2015 they made the jump to the native VST / AU format with Anthology X. This included many algorithms from classic Eventide hardware units like the H8000 and H3000, which were cleverly repackaged into 17 different plug-ins. With a high asking price and a heavier focus on mixing and tracking use cases, many electronic producers passed on the bundle in favour of alternatives from SoundToys or Waves. However, this December Eventide released its latest bundle, Anthology XI, which includes new effects that make it more attractive to producers working in less traditional realms.

A good example of the new creative plug-ins added to Anthology XI is Fission, the first of Eventide’s Structural Effects range. This is a new core technology developed by Eventide that lets you split incoming audio into separate transient and tonal parts in real-time for independent processing. We reviewed this plug-in back in March, and were impressed with the myriad ways it could be used. It’s great for tuning drums and percussion, since you can independently adjust the tonal portion of a drum hit while leaving the crucial transient intact from a pitch and energy perspective. You can also use it for extreme sound design, like removing all transients from a sample or enhancing them with delay or reverb. Fission includes six transient effects and seven tonal effects, and the ability to tweak the split engine in many ways. It’s surprising how much it can do.

Reverbs are also well represented in Anthology XI’s new additions. The two that I was most excited about were Blackhole and MangledVerb. These plug-ins are essentially recreations of two of the best algorithms from Eventide’s Space stompbox, and they have a look and feel that matches the hardware. This greatly improves usability compared to the older Eventide UIs, which tended to feel a bit complex. Blackhole, MangledVerb and UltraTap all have well-designed controls over the most important parameters of their respective algorithms. But most exciting are the ribbon and hotswitch controls, which allow you to morph and swap between two snapshots of the effect’s parameters. These are definitely the non-traditional reverbs of the bunch, with Blackhole specialising in huge ambient soundscapes and MangledVerb incorporating a complex distortion algorithm into its reverb chain for additional grit. If you’re looking for more realistic reverbs, Anthology XI’s 2016 Stereo Room and UltraReverb can fit the bill.

The H3000 Factory in particular gave me countless “wow” moments during my time testing the plug-in. While it’s getting on in age (having first made an appearance in the original Anthology TDM collection in 2006), the sheer power housed within the modular environment of the plug-in is astounding. Also, there’s another benefit to the slightly older codebase that the H3000 Factory and other original Eventide effects are built on: CPU efficiency. If it was designed to run on computers over a decade ago and sound great doing so, today’s modern processors would have no problem stacking multiple instances within a single session.

Other highlights from the older plug-ins include the H910/H949 Harmonizers, which sparkle with the characteristic sound of ’80s music production, and the Octavox/Quadrovox pitch shifters. Octavox in particular is a bit of a hidden gem. The ability to use a piano-roll sequencer to draw in the pitch and timing of its eight pitch-shifters yields the most musical approach to this style of effect that I’ve seen before.

When it comes down to it, the main downside with Anthology XI is the asking price. If you own other Eventide plug-ins or bundles, the upgrade costs can be significantly reduced. But if you’re coming in fresh to the world of Eventide, the asking price is pretty steep: $1799. When you compare this to something like SoundToys 5, which retails at $499, it can seem a bit overwhelming. However, if purchased individually, the plug-ins included in Anthology XI would cost over $3500. Even if you just wanted Blackhole, Fission and H3000 Factory, you’d be close to the price of Anthology purchasing those on their own. But if you’ve got the money and are looking for a CPU-friendly effect suite that covers a huge spectrum of audio processing, Anthology XI is worth your consideration.

Running from New Year’s Eve through January 10th, EPIZODE strode into its second year with a sense of confidence that was reflected in a lineup stuffed with top-level names. The Vietnamese island of Phú Quốc, situated just south of Cambodia, was barely on the map ten years ago, but now a lucrative tourism boom has taken hold and resorts are springing up by the dozen. It’s still early days for the island’s industry, but the next few years could prove pivotal to its appeal as a destination.

The EPIZODE concept is a familiar one: a partnership of foreign promoters and organisers heads to an exotic location to showcase international artists to an international crowd. Comparisons with BPM Festival (formerly of Mexico, now of Portugal) were heard aplenty, although EPIZODE was thankfully free of the challenges that festival faced in January last year. (That said, the organisers included the teams behind Kazantip Festival and Moscow club ARMA, two promoters that have weathered their fair share of storms back home.)

There are many different ways to organise a beach festival, but the organisers opted for an intimate setting with three stages. Most of the structures were made out of bamboo. There were juice bars and thoughtful chill-out spots, which meant the predominant atmosphere onsite was laid-back and hippyish, boosted by a healthy contingent of international backpackers. Most reports suggested that last year’s much smaller crowd was largely Russian.

When an international party lands in the tropics there’s always a risk that local concerns will get overlooked, but a solid portion of Southeast Asian ticketbuyers had been drawn in by the efforts made to showcase talent from the region. While South Korea’s Peggy Gou—who played two excellent back-to-backs with Bambounou—might well be considered a European artist nowadays (she lives in Berlin), the likes of Hong Kong’s Ocean Lam and Jo.D demonstrated how forward-thinking music from this part of the world can be. The smaller Egg stage played host to many of these acts, and Lam and Jo.D in particular laid down impressive sets of electro and nervy acid.

As often happens at dance music events with so many heavyweight names, there were times when a kind of tech house homogeny took hold—the likes of Richie Hawtin and Loco Dice rolled out typically ordinary sounds. There were, though, plenty of distinctive performances. On January 6th, Denis Kaznacheev played a rich warm-up set on the Freesby stage, with playful, expressive strains of minimal that set the tone perfectly for Sammy Dee and Ricardo Villalobos. The Chilean was at the top of his game well into the morning, inspiring a feverish response from the crowd when dropping irreverent party material like the Thomas Bangalter/Bob Sinclar belter “Gym Tonic.” (Or was it Spacedust’s subsequent rip-off, “Gym And Tonic”? It was hard to tell.) He later returned for a picturesque sunset session where he had free reign to indulge his freaky side with all manner of abstract rhythms and tones.

It was often Freesby that was home to the festival’s best moments, particularly during afterhours sessions where the vibe would get very loose as the sun rose. tINI and Bill Patrick were on exceptional form on January 9th, whipping out Dexter’s “I Don’t Care” to great effect. Tyoma, part of the festival’s organisational team, made a memorable scene of the final sunset with daring but tender selections, veering from UNKLE’s “Rabbit In Your Headlights” to Brad Fiedel’s original theme for Terminator 2: Judgement Day. The ARMA crew took control for the final hours, with Hipushit in particular laying down some crucial slow and trippy tackle before Orgue Electronique fired up a live hardware acid set well past the curfew.

Unfortunately, I was forced to miss Call Super in a frantic dash to make a direct flight from Phú Quốc back to London, which, given the shockingly low prices, suggests that many more from the UK may make the trip out next year. EPIZODE’s small size and loose attitude is rare for a festival with such a weighty lineup and impressive production, and the question of where to go next weighs heavy on the team’s minds. (Musical director and resident DJ Roustam Mirzoev spoke of his desire to bring more live acts and bands into the mix.) All were in agreement that this second edition had been a success, and a step forward from last year. If it can maintain its cosy atmosphere and build on integrating with the South East Asian electronic music community, EPIZODE could become a truly unique festival within the increasingly hectic international circuit.

Russell will also collaborate with Toby Ziegler on a music and art installation in Dalston, at the site of the soon-to-open Hackney Arts Centre. It’ll run from February 14th through 17th, and will include a three-screen video work featuring music from the album alongside Ziegler’s visual art. The first Everything Is Recorded live performance will happen at the venue on February 15th, with Russell joined by Sampha, Ibeyi, Warren Ellis, Obongjayer, Rachel Zeffira, Infinite and more. Some of the band’s rehearsals will also be open to the public.

The first release is an album from his label partner Christopher Coe, AKA Digital Primate.

Carl Cox’s new record label will launch in May.

The label’s called Awesome Soundwave, or ASW for short, and it’s geared towards artists who make and perform their music live. It’s founded alongside Christopher Coe, AKA Digital Primate, who will also offer up the label’s first release, an eight-track album called MNTNS of SLNC. As the name might suggest, the album is inspired by the damp, mountainous landscapes of the artist’s home on the west coast of Ireland. There’s also a couple of remix EPs in the pipeline for that one.

Yu Yu will also curate a stage in an underground cave at the 2018 Comunité festival in Tulum.

A new nightclub called Yu Yu has opened at Calle Versalles 94 in Mexico City.

The cozy 120-capacity club is tucked into the basement of a late 19th-century residence in the capital’s Juárez neighborhood. It’s equipped with a Martin Audio Blackline X series sound system and an Alpha Recordings 9000 rotary mixer.

The programming will emphasize the city’s wealth of local talent, including collectives like Cuatro Cuartos, NAAFI, Departure Records and CVMR, though they also have international headliners like Tin Man, Rhadoo, Kalawila and Auntie Flo booked for upcoming dates.

Yu Yu will also present a stage at the 2018 edition of Comunité, the Tulum festival that takes place on January 5th. They’ll take over an underground cave at a nature reserve in the jungle, with a bill that includes Matias Aguayo, Clap! Clap!, Kuniyuki & Soul Of Hex, rRoxymore, Tevo Howard, Olin, Eris Drew, Aleksa Alaska, Francis Harris and Itzone.

1. “HOME” – JOE GODDARD [DOMINO]

Joe Goddard’s endearing re-make of Danny Tenaglia’s, “Music Is The Answer” may have been the shining single off his sophomore album, Electric Lines. However, it was this particular single, “Home” which struck four-on-the-floor gold thanks to an immaculate disco chorus sung by up-and-coming vocalist, Daniel Wilson who also stars in the accompanied music video. A tongue-in-cheek, five minute story which follows the vocalist himself on an early-morning, cab-ride home from the club, drifting into unconsciousness towards an animated disco-wonderland filled with psychedelic visions of nude disco divas, leather daddies, and the house music legend himself, Larry Levan.

2. “NOTHING REALLY MATTERS” – TOTO CHIAVETTA [INNERVISIONS]

At about 4AM on one Friday the 13th this past January in the middle of the Yucatan jungle, Dixon was unleashing one unidentified track after another and the very peak of his set he featured this otherworldly tribalistic party-starter by Italian producer, Toto Chiavetta. The tune went down in Day Zero history as the biggest track ID only to be released a long eight months later with seven other fantastic numbers on dance music’s most illustrious imprint, Innervisions. It set the bar higher than ever thanks to an odd pairing of middle-eastern strings and tribal rhythms colored with trippy, reverberated sound effects. It sounded like nothing else yet it fit in perfectly with the vibe of 2017.

3. “HEAL ME” – RODRIGUEZ JR. [MOBILEE]

I’m completely dumbfounded as to why Rodriguez Jr’s “Heal Me” wasn’t a bigger charting tune in 2017. It’s a nearly perfect composition from his sophomore album, Baobab which was released this past June. Press play, close your eyes, and drift away to sonic heaven.

4. “COLD HEART” – DUSKY [17 STEPS]

Dusky spent 2016 achieving electronica fame with their sophomore full-length effort, Outer. But in 2017, the London house duo went back to their roots by diving straight back into ’90 style garage and all things four-to-the-floor including this mega-balearic bomb they titled “Cold Heart.”

5. “V13A” – SUPER FLU [MONABERRY]

Dance music’s most remarkable duo split 2017 right down the middle with their most accomplished full-length yet simply titled Musik 3. It’s their third effort on the LP front and it features this absolutely maniacal, stop-and-go, dance-floor destroyer oddly titled “V13a” and it is without a doubt, one of the best tracks that house music had to offer in 2017.

6. “THE PHOENIX (PART 1)” – MARQUIS HAWKES [AUS MUSIC]

Marquis Hawkes’ “The Basement Is Burning” is the one that has been getting all the attention this year but his other release on Aus Music, “The Phoenix” is the one which truly took me to that special place. The ethereal, anthem-like tune practically reaches into my soul and transports me to house music heaven thanks to a traditional house recipe consisting of an immaculately sampled diva vocal, steady euphoric chords, and a raw syncopated bass-line which flawlessly massages the pumping rhythm better than any tune in recent memory.

7. “CHROMA” – LONE [R&S RECORDS]

Dance music’s most legendary imprint, R&S isn’t accustomed to releasing house music but Lone isn’t your run of the mill house producer. For the past ten years or so, the Nottingham producer who’s known privately as Matt Cutler has been churning out his own unique version of early ’90s electronica with a handful of full length albums and a select amount of euphoric singles scattered over a few different well-respected imprints.

Michael Mayer‘s fabulous long-player from late last year featured this indie/electro collaboration with Hot Chip‘s own Joe Goddard. Then just a couple of months later, the tune was given a couple of remixes but up until then, every incarnation of “For You” paled in comparison to Koze‘s revision. A brilliant makeover which features an ingenious bass-line that takes on a life of it’s own and practically steals the show from Joe Goddard!

9. “SILENT STARS” – JIMPSTER [FREERANGE RECORDS]

Jimpster continues to rule the underground house scene with a critically-acclaimed catalog as far as the eyes can see and in this particular year, he continues his string of high quality tunes. He released his first first full length in four years and it starred this enchanting tribal jam which he masterfully crafted to fit the vibe of 2017.

10. “REALITY” – TIM ENGELHARDT [FRYHIDE]

Wedged smack dab in the middle of house and techno and sitting on top of the ten best of the year is this absolute masterpiece by German-based producer, Tim Engelhardt.

If you’re planning on traveling this year for NYE, may we suggest Bangkok?

The Bangkok Countdown is making its debut this year in Thailand on December 30 & 31. Featuring some of EDM’s top artists, including Afrojack and Knife Party (who will be doing the countdown), this is bound to be a memorable experience you’ll be telling your friends about for years to come.

Brought to you by the same creative minds that present Thailand’s wettest and wildest Songkran extravaganza S2O, this spanking new festival promises to wow New Year’s revelers with a genuine music festival atmosphere – huge futuristic stages, Bangkok’s best comfort food, digital experiences, and a diverse line-up of international artists DJs from various electronic music genres.

And now, the festival has officially unveiled the design of their main stage and it is absolutely incredible. Featuring 16 massive LED screens and trusses sporting a variety lighting effects – and don’t forget about the lasers – this main stage is worthy of being called one of Asia’s most elaborate stages.

The original track is loudly taking over the charts on a global scale, raking in an astounding 40 million plays since its release. “Dirty Sexy Money” debuted at the MTV VMA awards in November and exploded the track into its perpetual path of success. The official music video was released last week, and the remix package is slated for a release just before Christmas.

Banx & Ranx’s remix gets a head start with a tribal, moombahton, and reggae vibe with a low-passed pluck and percussion from KIIDA that flows flawlessly with Charli XCX’s vocals. Banx & Ranx take the remix into a dancehall-fueled track without losing the cultural flavor and allow for maximum exposure on the dirty dutch elements with the sunny vibe to shine through. Cesqeaux, who’s signed to Barong Family and Mad Decent, effortlessly embeds the slo-mo reggaeton rhythm that acts as the remix’s foundation and allows for imminent and unlimited building. Lastly, Mesto and Joe Stone (Spinnin’ Records) polish off the cunning remix with flavored indie-dance and electro elements that feature funky piano house melodies and synth refrains.

You can catch David Guetta in the states for NYE weekend, or catch him on his tour through Europe this winter!

For many years, the worlds of gaming and electronic music have collided. Whether it was a game soundtrack or a dance themed game, video games have served as a prominent source of inspiration for producers to create their own music. With VR gaming becoming popular, it’s only natural that a company would develop a music based game for that system. VR Gaming company, Survios, has recently announced the development of a music creation and performance game called ‘Electronauts’.

The game enables you to create, remix and perform music within a virtual world. Sounds pretty sweet, right? On top of using the songs in the game, the game also allows users to upload their own songs into the game. Let’s say you want to do a mash up of a handful of songs from a variety of genres. That’s all possible to upload and perform in Electronauts. Each player will be given three DJ tables with the handheld controllers operating a variety of functions in the game. You can perform songs, play a variety of instruments, record loops, re-arrange your drum kits and much more within the game.

Musical ability doesn’t matter as there is no musical requirements to play the game. A beginner will have as much fun in this game as the seasoned musician. For the latter, this could serve as a new source of inspiration. Beta versions of the game will be available to select players in early 2018 with the game expected to be available to the public later that year.

He may have retired from touring or performing, but Avicii was everything but inactive this year. A successful new EP, a documentary, and a video game were just some of the project he was involved in this year.

Swedish producer now released a new video, for a song “You Be Love,” taken off his comeback EP AVĪCI (01). The new, 3D video offers Avicii’s idea of creating an entirely new way of telling a love story, lead by surprise, technical innovation, creativity, and emotion.

The minimalistic video made completely in 3D with directors TNT offers a new dimension to the emotional track featuring low-timbered rock and roll vocalist Billy Raffoul. The tragic story, inspired by antique art forms, accompanies the song in the right way, once again exposing Avicii’s eye for details and exploring instincts.

AVĪCI (01) has already proved to be a huge success, while “You Be Love” generated over 19 million streams on Spotify alone.

Illenium is a Denver-based DJ and producer who thousands of listeners have fallen in love with. Over the years, he has worked to perfect his entrancing, innovative sounds through producing various singles, EPs, albums, and live sets. With only one show left of his nearly sold out North American tour for his Awake album, he has been busy beyond belief. However, that didn’t stop him from seeking out some amazing pianists and surprising all of us Illenials with a new release on his label Seeking Blue / Kasaya.

This newest release from the Denver-based producer is a small compilation of various piano covers of hit songs from Awake titled. Not your average remix EP, these 3 songs are transformed by extremely talented pianists into even more tear-jerking versions of the originals.

“Beautiful Creatures” is the first track, which is covered by Julien Marchal. This is the softest interpretation of all of the tracks, but does an amazing job of capturing the feel and story of the original song. “Fractures,” covered by Lorcan Rooney, is almost identical to the original as the piano follows the melody of Nevve’s vocals almost perfectly. Finally, Lambert’s cover of “Crawl Outta Love” is included. This cover is absolutely stunning and is sure to give you chills when you hear the delicate piano notes combined with the soft backing rhythms.

So far, this sneaky release is only available on Spotify. However, we wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes available on iTunes and/or Soundcloud later on. Each song is linked below so grab your tissues, put on your Illenium merch, and be prepared to be carried away into complete audio bliss.

“You made something ’cause it sounds good?” Jlin said in an interview this year. “For real? You’re not doing enough.” Her second album lives up to that ethos: Jlin completely rewrites footwork’s DNA into something complex and sinister. Through singular rhythms and stark soundscapes, the American artist shows the kind raw power you can harness with drums, samples and an incredible imagination.

Here’s an example of how to make radically weird music that still rocks a party. Since their first album last year, the Jamaican duo have sharpened their sound down to a dangerous point, arriving at a style that is menacing, psychedelic and even silly at times.

Among many other subjects, Lee Gamble was wrestling with artistic development, premodern musical notation, politics and soundsystem culture when he wrote Mnestic Pressure. This makes sense. The record achieves an incredible collision, where complex themes and ideas meet the raw immediacy of the dance floor.

With Take Me Apart, Kelela did what few artists can in following up a standout debut: she transformed while also getting to the heart of what makes her unique. Though she recruited a number of star producers for the album, what emerged from those sessions was an R&B masterwork that’s saturated with her personality. It mixes sex, sadness, vulnerability and empowerment in a way that captures the beautiful, messy essence of real life.

Four Tet showed us his range in 2017. There was “Question,” a simple yet insanely catchy club cut, followed by New Energy, a gorgeous, elaborate record that swings from Rounds-era sounds to lush house and quasi-trance. If his recent run of dance floor singles were lost on any of his original fans, then this album will have won them straight back.

Was there a more assured debut album in 2017 than Modern Species? With its humid atmospheres, light-footed percussion and wafting melodies, is the perfect soundtrack for an introspective summer’s journey. In a year of great records from Aarhus’s blossoming Regelbau crew, this is the standout.

Ideepsum captures an artist looking to the past for inspiration. Made up of six club tracks for the body and mind, this double-pack is a breakout release from a little-known Romanian producer with a cosmic touch. Tech house might be a dirty term in 2017, but Sublee reaffirms its potential for enchanting dance floor moments.

Young Marco worked old-school rap, digi-dub and all manner of global oddities into his sets this year, and his Selectors compilation for Dekmantel feels like a trip around the world at 80 BPM. On this journey, we take in Wolf Müller’s tropical drums, Dutch cosmic music from The Force Dimension, and new age house from Larry Heard.

Weightless? This was one of the heaviest experimental electronic records we heard this year. The Spanish artist confirmed her status as one of the scene’s most interesting newcomers, releasing this dense, industrial-infused full-length on the one hand, and tearing up Berghain’s new Säule venue with her DJs sets on the other hand.

On Fever Ray’s 2009 debut, Karin Dreijer, appearing on her own for the first time, kept her cards close to her chest, with a sound still wedded to The Knife’s Silent Shout. Arriving eight years later, Plunge is an altogether different proposition, a tour-de-force that explores sexuality and politics with lyrics so blunt they can feel like rallying cries (“Free abortions! And clean water!”). Paired with characteristically alien sounds, produced together with Peder Mannerfelt, the album confirms Dreijer as one of the visionary musicians of our time.

Screen Memories is the result of five years spent alone in a house in rural Minnesota, where John Maus not only wrote and recorded these odd bits of synth pop, but also built the synthesizers he played them on. This gives you an idea of the eccentric mind behind Screen Memories, a record that, like all of Maus’s work, is made from baroque synth melodies, post-punk rhythms and inscrutable lyrics, this time touching on subjects like the apocalypse, pets dying and football.

Reassemblage synthesises some of 2017’s most recognizable crate-digger trends—Japanese ambient, fourth world music, new age—into startlingly modern music. Using complex processing and production techniques, the American duo pay a respectful homage to their influences. It’s music that hints at various cultural traditions without directly touching on them, like folk music from an alternate reality.

Laurel Halo calls her third solo album, Dust, the happiest album she’s made. Of course, it’s not that simple—the LP’s sunny dub motifs, cryptic lyrics and scattershot percussion make for a journey that’s both beguiling and distant. This intricate dreamworld—constructed with help from collaborators like Klein, Lafawndah and Eli Keszler—is alien, yet intimate, with moments of warmth that draw us in again and again.

Well, they pulled it off. One of this year’s big talking points was how LCD Soundsystem wrote a comeback record that exceeded expectations. American Dream doesn’t soar to the anthemic highs of its predecessors, but as a front-to-back listening experience it’s arguably the best record they’ve ever written.

Tzusing’s debut album is inspired by a literary character who castrates himself in order to become a more nimble martial artist. The Malaysian-Chinese producer’s approach to techno is similarly concerned with agile attacks. With broken beats and exotic instrumentation borrowed from industrial and EBM, 東方不敗 is techno cut with the supple strokes of a master swordsman.

On the afternoon of Wednesday 22nd February, lots of people simultaneously gasped, “Oh, shit.” That was the day Arca announced his third album with “Piel,” the first taste of his new vocal-led music. Exactly ten months later, it feels like the record, along with its accompanying live show and videos, is the boldest artistic statement made in electronic music this year.

On his debut album, Bristol producer Kristian Jabs pulls a striking range of ideas from a limited palette. He blends drum & bass, techno and trip-hop with a touch that’s so technical it’s a little scary, while immersing the listener in a bleak miasma that sticks to you. It’s fitting that it came out on Blackest Ever Black: the album is draped in only the darkest hues.

Genres like trance and progressive house are popular for a reason: they’re often produced with maximum pleasure in mind. Bicep know this. On their long-awaited debut album, they siphon the best elements of those genres into something that fits with contemporary house and techno, making for some of the best dance floor moments of the year.

Last year, Chicago native Jana Rush quietly emerged from an almost 20-year hiatus with a wild-eyed footwork EP called MPC 7635. It reintroduced her as one of this year’s artists to watch, and she made good on that promise with Pariah, a rhythmic rollercoaster that proves her remarkable versatility, taking in soul samples, erratic acid lines and next-level rhythmic manoeuvres.

Dresvn into Objekt, Photek into Don’t DJ, Walter Brown into Yves Tumor—fabric 92 is perhaps the finest example yet of Joe Seaton’s fearless and idiosyncratic DJ style. But more than that, it’s a monument to DJing itself, showing how, with the right combination of taste, skill and daring, mixing records can have transcendental results.

Various
Visceral Minds 2
Fractal Fantasy

The Visceral Minds 2 compilation is exemplary in two ways. Firstly, it makes a coherent body of work out of 20 different collaborations between the label’s founders, Zora Jones and Sinjin Hawke, and others artists. Secondly, and crucially, its tracks are impressively experimental without losing a connection to the dance floor.

The full-length return of a techno and sound design dream team, Anguilla Electrica is a perfect blend of form and function. There are hints of dub techno in its six tracks, which modulate and morph while staying tethered to a steady 4/4 pulse. Abstract yet accessible, this is 2017’s most evocative techno album.

Where Are We Going? is that rare thing: a club-ready album that grips you all the way through. Its secret is its stylistic range, subtly guiding the listener through sublime deep house, uplifting garage and brooding techno in a way that feels intuitive. As anyone who saw Octo Octa’s brilliant live show can attest, hearing these tracks on a big system was a treat.

The average mix CD can get across a DJ’s style and taste, but they’re less common as a medium that shows artistic growth. Special Request’s Fabriclive 91 is a spectacular exception. By absorbing electro and ambient into the hardcore continuum that, over the years, Paul Woolford’s alias has refreshed with such style, the mix moves with a devil-may-care freedom and energy, summoning the spirit of one of dance music’s most celebrated eras.

Various
Outro Tempo: Electronic And Contemporary Music From Brazil 1978-1992
Music From Memory

A golden rule of crate digging is to root around sections that others are ignoring. Madrid-born, London-based selector John Gómez went one further, following a hunch and unearthing a little-known scene of visionary experimental electronic music from Brazil. Outro Tempo introduces us to singular artists like Andréa Daltro, Maria Rita and Priscilla Ermel, and shows an important bridge between their techniques and fourth world theory.

In a way Burnt Friedman’s music is destined to be overlooked—the Berlin artist does his best to defy all existing musical traditions, essentially ensuring he has no comfortable place in today’s musical landscape. Some of his records are so good, though, that they simply demand to be heard. Enter The Pestle, a striking and hypnotic collection that presents six of Friedman’s compositions in reverse chronological order, offering a tantalizing starting point for one of electronic music’s most creatively ambitious artists.

If you couldn’t already tell from his takeover of our Instagram account this year, Varg’s relationship with techno is a little different from most artist’s. Also see this singular album, on which, among other twists, AnnaMelina drops autotuned R&B vocals over a techno-meets-trap beat and, on a heady techno track, Yung Lean sings about killing his landlord. But don’t mistake these creative decisions for gimmicks: Varg’s best asset is how natural he makes breaking the rules sound.

Unlike her past work, Steffi’s third album doesn’t feature any vocals, but it still feels like her most personal release yet. Delicate and deeply evocative, it explores a nocturnal blend of IDM, electro and techno, the culmination of years spent collecting records and tinkering with synths. Recalling the alien sound of Ostgut Ton’s early years, it’s a refined LP from a veteran artist with more facets than most.

Darren Cunningham seemed inspired in 2017. In between travelling around India and collaborating with the world-renowned London Contemporary Orchestra, he put out AZD, an album full of the kind of woozy club music that made us fall in love with him to begin with. It contained, among other strange jams, “X22RME,” one of the year’s underrated club tracks.

Rembo is everything you’d want of a house and techno album. Its eight tracks are loaded with personality, conveyed through wild synth melodies, uptempo drums and amusing track titles. You’d dance all night to this music—the opportunities for which are increasing—yet its mist-in-the-woods atmosphere gives it a subtly mysterious pull.

In comparing Zwischenwelt to a “mysterious obelisk,” Mark Smith aptly summarised the album’s enigmatic sound. It draws equally from dub techno and drum & bass, but resembles neither style. That’s partly down to its use of Euclidean rhythms, each one taking turns to draw the ear. Not that much of this would cross your mind on a dance floor—you’d probably just ask, awestruck, “What the hell is this?”

Thundercat is a virtuoso bassist who uses his powers for good—Drunk weaves tangled basslines through a psychedelic smear of funk, R&B and hip-hop, as catchy as it is complicated. It’s dazed like a Saturday morning spent getting high and watching adult cartoons, with a sense of humour and the odd social commentary to match.

Inside A Quiet Mind collects music made in the midst of an extraordinary transformation: from techno artist to Hare Krishna. The Kiwi artist Denver McCarthy recorded these tracks in the second half of the ’90s—the final stretch of his life as an artist and, by his telling, a person with an ego. It’s hard not to hear this in the music itself: exquisitely reflective and atmospheric, these tracks seem to emanate from an elevated inner state.

Out of all of Brian Piñeyro’s aliases, it’s the “deep reggaeton” of DJ Python that stands out the most, and Dulce Compañia is the best example of it The project’s formula—slow dancehall beats that swing with the heft of dub techno—is so satisfying that you wonder how no one else thought of it before.

There’s a “can’t miss” appeal to Rush Hour’s Prescription retrospective. For a few magical years in the ’90s, house legends Ron Trent and Chez Damier focused on the spiritual, deep and healing aspects of dance music, crafting some of the genre’s all-time classics. This six LP box set contains a staggering amount of heat—you could mix an hour or two of perfect tracks using only Word, Sound & Power.

“Descending milky night”; “Rain, rain, rain”; “be like the bat that nearly flew into my room”: Cécile Schott’s music has a sense of poetry well beyond what we’d normally expect from electronic music, and not just in the lyrics. Her quivering synths, delicate and vivid, are at least as expressive as her breathy, self-trained singing voice. A Flame My Love, A Frequency is her first LP free of acoustic instruments, and it may well be her best.

Until last year, SW. had been SUED’s more silent member, with a subtler sound and slimmer release count than the label’s cofounder, SVN. That all changed with Untitled, AKA The Album, a massive leap forward for both artist and label that came out on vinyl last November and then digitally this year on Apollo. A dreamlike swirl of fluttering rhythms and moonlit atmospheres, blending elements of house, ambient and drum & bass, it’s rich enough that we’re still picking it apart a full year later.

2017’s most fun and creatively unhinged dance record arrived after six torturous years of work. “Turning the potential into a finished track is very, very hard for me,” Erik Wiegand told Lisa Blanning. We’re glad he persevered. The neon blend of techno and dancehall on Superlative Fatigue was unlike anything else out there this year.

Loud-Contact’s annual June party series, in collaboration with Proyectual, will take place at Parc Del Fòrum for the first time.

The Barcelona promoter Loud-Contact has announced June parties by CircoLoco, Diynamic and Afterlife, to take place at Parc Del Fòrum for the first time.

The dates for these parties are Thursday, June 14th, Friday, June 15th and Saturday, June 16th, respectively. The lineups will be announced January 8th. Tickets will go on sale next month, and further details on additional parties are expected to emerge around that time. A new stage and production will be set up specifically for the event series, which previously took place at Poble Espanyol. The Parc Del Fòrum, situated on the city’s northern waterfront, is a sprawling multi-purpose venue best known for hosting Primavera Sound festival.

The new agreement will allow Facebook users to upload video containing copyrighted audio as well as share songs.

Facebook has signed a multi-year global deal with major label Universal to feature its music on the social media platform.

A press release for the deal describes it as “unprecedented.” Universal’s recorded music and publishing catalog will be licensed to Facebook under the terms, which means that Facebook users will be able to upload videos with copyrighted material as well as sharing songs with each other as part of new features on the social media website. Universal is the first record label to sign such a deal, which will also extend to other Facebook-owned platforms like Instagram and Oculus. The press release also promises that the deal will allow users to “access a vast library of music across a series of social features” as new features are added over time.

The number of records for sale on Discogs has nearly quadrupled in size over the last two years.

Discogs’ global marketplace now has more than 37 million physical music releases available.

The for-sale section has experienced a nearly four-fold increase in volume since the popular user-built music database celebrated its 15th anniversary back in November 2015, when it was approaching 10 million total marketplace items. The first week of this month alone saw users make 130,000 orders—a record for the site. Currently, around 27.5 million vinyl releases are on sale, making up close to 75% of the marketplace’s listings.

Discogs announced earlier this year that it hit one million total labels and five million total artists in its database, and recently it revealed the results of a project with its sister site VinylHub plotting the locations of record stores around the world. Discogs has also launched marketplaces for movies, books, comics and posters.

A new hotline has been established in order to combat sexual harassment in the electronic music industry.

The Association For Electronic Music, an industry-wide not-for-profit group that’s also involved in the Get Played Get Paid Campaign, has launched the new service in partnership with UK workplace health provider Health Assured. Complete Music Update reports, “The new service will offer advice and guidance to those who call a dedicated phone line.”

The hotline is being set up in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, aftereffects of which have rocked the entire entertainment industry. Björk reported sexual harassment at the hands of an unnamed Danish director, while 2,000 women from the Swedish music industry signed a #MeToo letter indicating endemic sexism. Many male industry leaders have resigned or apologized in the wake of accusations.

If you are experiencing sexual harassment you can speak confidentially to specially trained staff now by calling 0800 030 5182.

On Sunday, June 17th, the Berlin label will have the run of the entire venue for the first time.

Innervisions will return to Barcelona’s Poble Espanyol in June 2018 for a one-off event spread across three stages.

Details are scarce at this point, but key members from the Berlin label will oversee the venue’s three main spaces—Plaza Mayor, La Carpa / Picnic Area and El Monasterio—for the first time, on Sunday, June 17th. The party, which will run from from 2 PM through midnight, is a collaboration between Innervisions, local promoter Centris Events and a new outfit named OFFSónar. The full lineup will be revealed in January.

A DJ has died and more were injured at a Brazilian dance music festival after a stage collapsed due to extreme weather conditions.

Kalleby Freitas da Rosa (AKA DJ Kaleb), 30, was standing behind the EDM event’s O Santuário Stage on Sunday afternoon when heavy rain and gale-force winds caused the huge metal structure to topple. (DJ duo Pura Vida were performing when it fell.) Da Rosa suffered head injuries and was immediately rushed to hospital, where he died on arrival. Three others were injured in the incident. The festival took place at Parque Estadual De Exposições Assis Brasil in Esteio, a municipality near Porto Alegre in the south.

Atmosphere Festival issued a statement via Facebook yesterday evening, which has been translated from the original Portuguese.

“We always cherish the security of our audience, following all the processes, reports and authorisations requested by the local authorities. And to our audience we will keep them informed of all our actions to keep the truth about the facts that have occurred. We’re sorry, we lost a friend, an artist. Our priority is to assist the wounded and their families. We thank the military brigade and the fire department for all their assistance.”

The 26-hour party with Dixon and Honey Dijon goes down at Avant Gardner starting New Year’s Eve.

Cityfox has announced the full lineup for its lengthy New Year’s bash at Avant Gardner.

The event, which stretches across two stages, begins at 10 PM on New Year’s Eve and extends until the early hours of January 2nd, allowing for extended sets from Lee Burridge, Honey Dijon and Dixon. It runs for 26.2 hours, equivalent to the distance of a marathon in miles.

The party also boasts a live performance from Recondite, Job Jobse and DJ sets from Steve Bug and The Martinez Brothers. Check out the full lineup in the event listing below.

Tickets for Cityfox 2018 NYE are available here on RA. (Discounted tickets on RA are also available through the members-only app Visionnaire.)

The indoor space, and its two custom soundsystems, came into existence with support from a successful Kickstarter campaign that Carter and Harkin, AKA Mister Saturday Night, launched earlier this year. It features a restaurant and bar along with a dining room that turns into a dance floor for parties on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. (Thursday nights will have free admission.) One soundsystem is described as an homage to audiophile listening bars in Tokyo’s Shibuya neighborhood, and the other, built by longtime sound engineer Craig Bernabeu, is designed for dance floor use.

This Friday’s Opening Night event will feature sets from Discwoman crew member Bearcat, Night Doll and Precolumbian. The following evening sees Carter and Harkin hold court with Mister Saturday night. On Sunday, the venue hosts its first weekly Planetarium event—an early-evening session “where people are invited to bring pillows, blankets and sleeping bags to lie on the floor and get lost in music,” as a press release puts it. Huerco S, playing live, is the guest at that one, with Carter, Harkin and Planetarium resident Josh Dunn DJing throughout the night. After this weekend’s set of parties, Indoors will open for business on a daily basis starting next Thursday.

Upcoming bookings at Indoors include Avalon Emerson, Scott Grooves and Aurora Halal each playing all-night sets, and a double bill featuring Veronica Vasicka and Josh Cheon (the mind behind our current label of the month, Dark Entries), along with the likes of Phil Moffa, K-HAND, Gunnar Haslam and DJ Python.

Berlin’s city government has pledged €1 million to fund noise protection in clubs and venues.

According to national newspaper Der Tagesspiegel, the money will go towards things like soundproofing venues—including providing noise barriers for outdoor areas—and the windows of nearby residential properties. Though it’s not yet clear how the fund will be distributed, the decision was welcomed by Berlin’s Club Commission. “In a densely populated city, where residential development is close to music venues, investment must be made in noise protection to ensure coexistence,” said its spokesman Lutz Leichsenring.

The article goes on to mention that around ten Berlin venues currently have issues with their neighbours, including YAAM, KulturBrauerei and Jonny Knüppel. From 2011 through 2015, 170 clubs closed down in the capital.

Last week, London also made progress in the battle to protect music venues when mayor Sadiq Khan stated his ambitions to pursue the Agent Of Change principle in his latest Draft London Plan. If introduced, the law would force developers, rather than venue owners, to pay for soundproofing.

We are proud to announce the cooperation with Move Music Distribution for our new record label called ‘Dance Factory Records.

Efficient content management system. The most advanced content management and delivery system allows us to deliver your music within hours to all major DSP-s. Our platform is one of the most user friendly on the market, the fact which saves time and makes your release creation, distribution or promo send out effortless.

The experimental electronic event is sending out a call for proposals.

MUTEK has confirmed a new San Francisco festival set to debut from May 3rd through 6th, 2018.

It will be the first time the global experimental festival—which started out in Montreal—has happened in the US. The San Francisco edition will be co-directed by Surefire Agency founder Miroslav Wiesner and Gabrielle de Villoutreys. The initial lineup and venues will be announced in the coming weeks, while the festival will also set up a call for submissions and proposals from US-based artists on its Facebook page.

“The intersection of art, music, and technology combined with the adaptive nature of the city, its accessible size, the concentration of ideas and its constant supply of curious travelers make San Francisco an ideal location for the first American MUTEK edition,” says Wiesner. “The community needs this now more than ever as the old and the new establish their coexistence and find connections in culture and expression.”

The new festival was first teased in September, when MUTEK SF graffiti tags popped up around the Bay Area. It’s the latest in a series of new editions for the festival, which also launched in Dubai and Buenos Aires this year.

“Our team is shattered and all the money invested in this start-up is gone,” posted Music Goes Further on Facebook.

Music Goes Further, the company behind the Into The Valley festival franchise, has cancelled Into The Castle in South Africa.

The one-day event was due to take place at Castle Of Good Hope in Cape Town on January 26th, 2018. In a statement posted to Facebook, Music Goes Further said the losses from the cancellation of Sweden’s Into The Factory festival in July, which totalled over €400,000, caused an “acute liquidity shortage,” forcing them to indefinitely postpone the forthcoming event in South Africa. The company also made losses of more than €150,000 at Into The Valley in Estonia, which was plagued by bad weather and small crowds.

“2017 was an absolute nightmare for us, and still is,” reads the statement. “The initiative is on a total pause at the moment and we are working day and night trying to clean this situation up. If we do not make it, it will be the end of our brands, Into The Valley, Into The Factory and Into The Castle, and also for us as festival organizers. It would be beyond sad but we could just never imagine such a series of large setbacks striking us one after another.”

The organisers add: “Our team is shattered and all the money invested in this start-up is gone. We need to take a big step back in order to be able to come back with new energy in 2018. It is our goal to produce a festival in Europe during 2018, but at this point it is too early to plan for this or make any promises. We keep toiling and praying for things to start moving in the right direction.”

Music Goes Further still owes money to artists who played at its previous events. They thanked the likes of Nina Kraviz and Larry Heard for waiving their fees and called on other artists to follow suit, saying “We hope that more artists will follow their example as this cancellation was really out of our hands. Doing so, and refraining the fee, would be vital and a huge help for us to get back on our feet.”

Ricardo Villalobos, Nicolas Lutz and Boddika are all down for extended sessions at the London club.

London club fabric will host a series of all-night back-to-backs in 2018.

The extended sessions will run sporadically throughout the year, though they’ll always take place on Saturdays. The first wave of pairings are Adam Shelton and Subb-an (January 13th), Nicolas Lutz and Craig Richards (January 20th), Boddika and Redshape (January 27th), and Richards and Ricardo Villalobos (February 18th). The Martinez Brothers will play the only solo all-night set, in Room One on January 27th.

Other acts confirmed for January and February include Amelie Lens, Petre Inspirescu, Slam and this week’s RA podcaster, Anastasia Kristensen. Head to fabric’s RA page for the full listings.

’90s records from John Tejada, Steve Pickton and Dan Curtin will all be back on the shelves soon.

The Danish techno and house label Multiplex is back in business after almost 20 years of inactivity.

Multiplex was started in 1995 by Copenhagen scene stalwarts Steen ‘Kong’ Mogensen and Cai Bojsen-Møller. The label’s initial three-year run resulted in 32 vinyl and CD releases from artists like John Tejada, Dan Curtin, Morgan Geist, Artificial Funk and the two founders. It ceased operations in 1998, and many of its records have since become hard to come by on the secondhand market.

Mogensen is now teaming with Daniel Kaarill, a longtime DJ, photographer and promoter who also hails from Copenhagen, to reboot Multiplex. The two aren’t dealing with represses—they got their hands on old stock, much of which had been “hidden away” in original packaging from the pressing plant for years.

Their first new move is making several of the label’s records available again. The two-part Tivoli Trax and Steve Pickton’s Sound Of Stas, credited to his Stasis alias, are out now. More releases will follow soon.

Also in the works is a reissue EP, and new music, but details are still TBA.

Listen to samples for a few of those rediscovered records at the Rush Hour store.

The likes of Laurent Garnier and Jeff Mills have signed a petition against the reforms.

New volume restrictions are being imposed on clubs and festivals in France.

The government of Emmanuel Macron issued a public health decree on August 7th that aims to reduce hearing damage in the French population by lowering the maximum volume permitted at clubs and festivals from 105 to 102 decibels. (Decibels is a logarithmic form of measurement, which means the difference between three units above 100 decibels is greater than at lower volumes).

Bass frequencies in particular are being curtailed. Signage warning of the risks of hearing damage and free earplugs will be mandatory, and venues must also create a quiet zone of less than 80 decibels for patrons to rest their ears. The restrictions apply for venues with a capacity greater than 300 people and will come into effect next year.

Laurent Garnier, Jeff Mills, Rex Club, Antigone, Cabanne, Concrete, Voiski and others have signed an open letter protesting the new rules. The letter also announces a formal campaign to annul the decree and urges the opening of public debate on the matter. “Public health concerns us as any citizen, but we fear that we will sacrifice artistic freedom,” the letter says. “The ones we want to protect are the artists, the operators of closed and open spaces and the festivals… This decree will inevitably lead to a decline in attendance and, at the same time, a significant drop in the revenues of festive establishments and festivals.”

The new software features four new devices and a redesigned sound library.

Ableton has announced Live 10.

With the latest version of its influential DAW, the Berlin-based company is primarily focusing on improving Live as a creative tool. There’s a new synth called Wavetable, which contains a selection of waveforms from various instruments, modelled analogue filters and complex modulation capabilities. A device called Echo expands on Live’s suite of delay effects, offering a greater range of digital and analogue textures and more scope for experimentation than the existing Ping Pong and Simple Delay options. An all-in-one drum processing device called Drum Buss will offer control over transient shaping, saturation, low-end intensity and more. Pedal, a new overdrive effect, models different flavours of distortion and fuzz found in guitar pedals, although Ableton says it also excels on drums and synths.

Live’s workflow has also been overhauled. Inputs and outputs can be renamed to match the hardware in your studio, streamlining the process of routing audio in and out of the program. MIDI clip editing has been tweaked, allowing users to view and edit multiple clips at a time. A new feature called Capture transforms ideas into MIDI while retaining the unique swing of the performance, while the implementation of note-chasing triggers MIDI notes even if playback starts in the middle of the note. (This means you don’t need to start from the beginning of a MIDI clip to hear its content).

The mixing process has also been enhanced. Groups of tracks can now be lodged within other groups and the Utility device gets a wider gain range and a bass mono feature. EQ Eight now has extended low frequency slopes and split stereo panning. The overall interface is sharper and the browser can be filtered by most-used tools. Arrangement view meanwhile gains one-key zooming, nudging, time-stretching and drag-and-drop track duplication.

The sound library has been expanded with four new packs of multi-sampled synths, keys and drums, while a Curated Collections organises sounds and instruments into common sonic themes. The sound quality of the Core Library has been upgraded and reorganised to make sounds easier to locate. In addition to an updated workflow, the Push controller now lets you perform in real time and step-sequence notes in the same layout. Note and device information can also be viewed directly on the device.

Max For Live has been fully built in to the program, which means it loads faster and uses less CPU. The devices themselves have been upgraded, including an improved Drum Synth, while multi-channel audio routing and SySex compatibility facilitate multi-speaker arrays and advanced MIDI-hardware integration respectively.

Live 10 will be available in the first quarter of 2018. From now until the release, the various versions of Live 9 are selling for 20% off. Those who purchase a copy of Live 9 will be entitled to a free upgrade to Live 10 when it’s released.

Watch a video about Live 10.

Ableton will release Live 10 in the first quarter of 2018. The Standard version will retail for €349, Suite for €599 and Intro for €79.

CDJs may have made mixing easier, but they’ve also ushered in an exciting new era of DJing. Michelle Lhooq reflects on the possibilities they’ve unlocked.

What exactly a DJ does behind the decks is a persistent subject of scrutiny and debate, both in the media and the smoky confines of nightclubs. Recently, it’s become hard to escape the notion that digital music players like laptops and CDJs are behind a new generation of lazy DJs who “just press play.” Haters cite the notorious sync button, which instantly beat-matches two tracks together, as a prime example of how technology has automated skills that DJs once spent years refining. The stigma endures among seasoned heads, who mutter “real DJs play vinyl” while dusting off their record collections.

The widespread idea that digital culture is watering down the art of DJing is a damaging, regressive misconception. Of course, certain technical aspects have gotten easier, but that’s not the point. Rather than using new technologies like beat-matching to cut corners, today’s forward-thinking DJs, often working outside the strict 4/4 confines of house and techno, are treating CDJs as musical instruments, exploring their artistic possibilities in exciting, uncharted ways. Here, we take a closer look at this latest evolution in DJ culture, how it is a response to the old turntable canon, and the crucial socio-political conditions that it sprang from.

The first CDJs, Pioneer’s CDJ-500, went on the market in October 1994. (As Jordan Rothlein noted in a history of the deck, some say the CDJ-300 came first in 1992, but Pioneer considers the 500 to be the official debut.) From the start, CDJs were distinguished by their marriage of the physical and digital, combining the tactile qualities of a turntable via a circular jog dial with a slew of digital tools, such as a “master tempo” button for changing a song’s speed without altering its key.

Subsequent models of CDJs added new digital tricks like hot cues, updated its jog dial into a touch-sensitive wheel, and shrunk in size to become more portable and stable, with the arrival of CDJ-1000 in 2001 marking its current form. Improved functionality—along with the rise of mp3 culture, which freed DJs from the physical and financial constraints of records—helped fuel the growing popularity of CDJs over the next two decades. “‘I can take a snippet of some news or a popular record and throw it in the mix in a completely different way,” Richie Hawtin told The New York Times in a 2001 piece celebrating the freedom and spontaneity of the digital DJ realm. “It opens these floodgates to a whole new potential.”

By the early 2000s, CDJs were fast becoming the standard set-ups at clubs and festivals. But their ubiquity coincided with the growing public perception that, well, DJs don’t really do much.

The golden age of EDM in the early 2010s only furthered this damaging stereotype. In a 2013 interview with GQ, Avicii admitted his sets were entirely pre-planned. Thanks to computers, he said, reading a crowd’s responses to determine what songs to play—a skill DJs historically took pride in cultivating—”feels like something a lot of older DJs are saying to kind of desperately cling on staying relevant.”

In 2014, dance music’s reputation in the American mainstream was served a death blow via an SNL skit called “When Will the Bass Drop?,” in which a DJ named “Davvinci,” played by Andy Samberg, clowns around in a DJ booth next to a giant red button labeled “BASS.” A deluge of headlines praising the viral video for “nailing” EDM culture followed, with a Gizmodo reporter sniffing, “It’s a hilarious parody, but it also tells the stark truth about DJs: Once they’ve put in the hard work of producing a track in the studio, their live shows aren’t really a performance so much as a glorified exercise in pressing play.”

There’s no doubt that CDJs have lowered the barrier to entry for many aspiring DJs by allowing them to hop on the decks with little more than a USB stick and a rudimentary knowledge of how to mix tracks. It’s also fair to argue that they’ve resulted in a formulaic DJing style, as RA’s Ryan Keeling pointed out in a 2016 op-ed called “DJing Shouldn’t Be Easy:” DJ selects track, hits the auto-sync, and brings the volume up, adjusting EQs to taste and using the loop function to buy more time in the mix.

Still, there are exceptions to this glut of mediocrity—DJs who are using CDJs to push their sets in novel and experimental ways—and they’re the ones that count.

One of the most unforgettable DJ sets I caught this year was a late-night back-to-back between Joey LaBeija and Rabit in a half-empty bar in Brooklyn, and hinged upon the unique capabilities of CDJs. Chuckling to each other as if it were a demented game, the two friends deployed some of the craziest techniques I’ve ever seen, effectively treating the CDJs like a DIY sampler and drumkit, and pushing functions like the pitch slider to their extremes. They’d slam the cue button to play a few seconds of a song over and over again, or flick the pitch slider so the tempo careened from 80 to 400 BPM within seconds, while using the loop button to stack layers of sounds over each other. The result was an adrenaline-soaked ride across a myriad of deconstructed club sounds—challenging, yet immensely enjoyable.

Sets like these are tough to imagine with a different setup. “What we do is specifically tied to this set of technology… You can only do what I do on CDJs,” Lotic told 032c in 2014. “There’s only so much you can do with a turntable,” agreed Janus founder Dan Denorch in the same interview. “The whole point of [DJing with turntables] used to be to not make the music stop,” he said. “Now the range is much larger.” Noting that digital technology has afforded a range of possibilities to manipulate music that were “unfathomable” ten years ago, DeNorch said CDJs have engendered “a different form of DJing—it’s a completely new art form.”

One of the most distinctive characteristics of this style is its discontinuity. Tracks of wildly different genres and tempos are stitched together with abrupt stops and starts or cacophonous sound effects. With a more fragmented approach to space and time, it’s not a coincidence that many of the DJs playing this way are operating outside the strict confines of 4/4 house and techno. In the same interview, Lotic called his “rude and disruptive” DJ style “a complete rejection of smoothness.” M.E.S.H, another Janus affiliate, put it this way: “They’re often looking for smoothness in other scenes, which we don’t really pay that much attention to.”

M.E.S.H. said over email that CDJs act like “a little window into the studio” by allowing you to access a large archive of sounds he’s made. In the past, he explained, he’s experimented with time signatures by mixing different loop lengths and approximated a granular synth pad by exploiting the pitch algorithm. Lately, he’s been feeding audio from CDJs back into a software mixing setup he designed himself.

At the same time, M.E.S.H. argued that CDJs allow for more flexibility and spontaneity because you can keep sounds in sync imperfectly through touch, rather than being stuck to a master MIDI clock as you would with a laptop or sequencer setup. “When you can be instinctive and have a tactile feeling of the sound, you can really open up,” he said. “It feels like an instrument.”

Venus X, another forerunner of this style, said that CDJs give her a greater sense of immediacy. “CDJs force you to be present at every moment of your set,” she said over email, citing the ability to sample moments from any track via hot cues, play with speed and loops in a tactile way, and mix in an aggressive manner that lets the audience hear everything you’re doing. “Other DJ programs lack that sense of immediacy and feel rehearsed.”

You could argue that these techniques are not a departure from vinyl DJing so much as an evolution of it. Using turntables, pioneers like Frankie Knuckles and Larry Levan would play two of the same records at the same time to edit out or extend certain sections, or use drum machines to beef up the beat. M.E.S.H also pointed out that Copenhagen-based DJ HVAD uses turntables to play in the abrasive style associated with CDJs, “skipping the needle around on a vinyl as if he had the whole thing hot-cued in his memory.”

Still, commonly used metaphors like “journey” and “storytelling” speak to how continuity is an inherent value in the traditional mode of DJing, where DJs were judged by their ability to weave tracks together into a coherent, overarching narrative. By pushing the paradigm from smoothness to rupture, the shift from analog to digital DJing mirrors the transition from modernism to postmodernism—a wave of critical thinking that developed in the mid to late-20th century and was described by Marxist literary theorist Fredric Jameson as the “cultural logic of late capitalism.” Whether in fields of art, music, or writing, postmodernists were concerned with themes of rupture, rebellion and the anxiety-ridden technological condition. The movement was also about amplifying historically excluded voices, with postmodern thinkers like Foucault examining the social systems that enable cultural hegemony, violence and exclusion from power.

Postmodernism came out of post-WWII disillusionment, with the fall of Berlin Wall in 1989 marking the start of the “postmodern age.” Social context is also key to understanding how the disjointed style of DJing under CDJs came to be. In her Art of DJing interview, Venus X noted that GHE20G0TH1K, a New York-based queer/POC party widely credited as an incubator for this style, came up between 2009 and 2012, when young people were struggling with the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis and rising student debt. “You couldn’t actually visualize your future and what does that sound like?” she said. “Pure fucking chaos.”

In the same interview, Venus also connected the disruptive DJ style associated with GHE20G0TH1K with a rebellion against the status quo, saying, “continuity is white power. Continuity is patriarchy.” Over email, she further explained this connection: “To my knowledge, most DJs qualify as good or bad depending on their ability to mix seamlessly and in ways that are non-confrontational. The philosophy of GHE20G0TH1K… is meant to disrupt those traditional male perspectives and conservative ideas of what nightlife and music are supposed to be.”

On a similar tip, the Indianapolis DJ Noncompliant pointed out to THUMP that by lowering social and financial barriers to entry, digital technology has allowed for new groups of women, queers, trans, non-Western and POC to join the fray. “Purists complain that ‘anybody’ can make music or DJ now, but that’s entirely the point,” she said. “‘Anybody’ means ‘the people who could never access it before.'”

Count me as one of those people who, because I lacked a record collection, never considered DJing until I was exposed to CDJs. When I first started learning how to play, a coworker who typically plays vinyl gave me a piece of advice I’ll never forget: the key to mixing, he said, was to take the vibe from one song and move it into the next, like a ball being passed from one hand to another around a basketball court. The players can zig or zag, but the ball can never be dropped. This colorful analogy is better suited to the smooth DJing style associated with turntables, but it can be also be applied to CDJs. Except instead of passing one ball around, DJs have all kinds of balls in the air at the same time, or are breaking them apart entirely, throwing the shards into your face while flipping the bird with a grin.

The incident took place at the venue on Manchester’s outskirts early on October 29th.

A man attacked door staff at The White Hotel in Salford last weekend armed with a knife and a substance police believe to be acid.

The incident happened at about 3:45 AM on Sunday, October 29th, during an event headlined by Dopplereffekt. According to Manchester Evening News, the man was ejected from the club and later returned to carry out the attack, throwing the liquid at bouncers before fleeing. Two staff members were taken to hospital with serious burns.

In a statement posted to Facebook, the venue said it was “shocked and saddened” by the incident, which it called “a random and isolated attack.” Located on Manchester’s outskirts, The White Hotel regularly hosts club nights with a mix of techno, electro, experimental music and more. The venue has set up a crowdfunding page to raise money for the two staff members hospitalised by the incident. They’ve also set up a donations box at the venue.

Read the venue’s full statement, which includes details on how eye witnesses can offer information to police.

DJ Sprinkles remixes are also included on the package, which comes out in December.

Terre Thaemlitz is releasing a multimedia album called Deproduction.

Comprising audio, video and text on a SD card, the package interrogates the Western Humanist conception of family, its global pervasiveness and its influence on the agendas of LBGT groups. The release, which comes out in December on Thaemlitz’s Comatonse imprint, also features two remixes by her DJ Sprinkles alias. It’s her first major release as Thaemlitz since 2012’s Soulnessless.

Deproduction was made with support from art organisiations documenta 14 and Akademie der Künste der Welt. It premiered at documenta 14 in Athens on July 9th and has also appeared at London’s Cafe Oto and Sheffield’s No Bounds Festival (Joe Muggs described the work as “hardcore Japanese incest and gay porn put through a kaleidoscope and overlaid with incredibly dark textual meditations on childbirth, reproduction, family dynamics and global politics.”)

Read Comatonse’s statement accompanying the release.

“We live in an era in which dominant LGBT agendas are increasingly revolving around themes of family, matrimony, breeding and military service. The cultural terms for social analyses and organizing around such issues requires an aggressive capitulation to peculiarly Western Humanist notions of the nuclear family, as well as private and public space. As a result, Feminist and Queer critical rejections of family structures (nuclear and otherwise) are increasingly scarce. An ability to understand the abuses of family and domestic violence as symptoms of larger institutionalized dominations becomes virtually impossible.

In a stereotypically familiar and heteronormative manner, the anticipated promise behind today’s Queer families is nothing more than the egocentric notion that familial abuses will be resolved by this generation being better parents than the previous generation. What is forever absent are discussions of what it means to deliberately not be a parent, and to deliberately abandon family. They remain as taboo as the notion of celebrating the relief of an abortion.”

Âme, Mano Le Tough, Blawan and Avalon Emerson will all DJ at the venue over the New Year’s period.

New club E1 London has revealed details of its 27-hour opening party, taking place this New Year’s.

Âme, Mano Le Tough, Blawan, Kiasmos, Avalon Emerson, Volvox and Denis Horvat have all been confirmed for the party, which begins at 9 PM on New Year’s Eve and runs through until midnight on January 1st. More names will be added to the bill. The club, formerly known as Studio Spaces, is located in Wapping, with a bespoke soundsystem installed with help from local audio company Sound-Services Ltd.

The venue, which features a bar upstairs and a small club space (called Krypta) in the basement, announced the news yesterday via Facebook. Speaking earlier today to Resident Advisor, Golem’s booker, Maurice Kattick, confirmed that the owner, Wolf Von Waldenfels, had decided to sell the venue in order to focus on another Hamburg spot, Uebel & Gefährlich, which he also owns.

Since opening in 2011, Golem has been a go-to spot for fans of underground house and techno—recent guests include Pariah, Bookworms and Skee Mask. The club’s closing parties will go down across November 24th and 25th, with full details, including lineups, coming next week.

The incident on Friday, October 28th resulted in several beatings and arrests, according to eyewitnesses.

Kiev club Jugendhub was raided by armed police and military officials on Friday, October 28th in an incident that resulted in multiple beatings, arrests and alleged theft of valuable equipment.

According to eyewitnesses and footage from the scene, around 50 “uniformed and masked men with weapons” stormed the 300-capacity venue at 2 AM. Approximately 200 people were inside at the time. “They started to turn out our pockets, beat the visitors and check all men for evasion of military service and some guys were taken away,” said Jugendhub co-founder Anastasiia Spyrydenko. “They beat people completely without reason—everyone was frightened and did not resist at all. Police used excessive physical strength, there were blood stains on the floor. Personal belongings, equipment [and] clothes were stolen.”

The official police report, published on the afternoon of Friday, October 28th, says that the club has been the subject of repeated noise complaints from nearby residents. On the night of the raid, 17 people were taken to a nearby police station on drug possession charges, while 11 underage partygoers were returned to their parents.

Another 32 people, accused of having evaded army service, were transported to a military enlistment office. (Army service is compulsory in Ukraine.) Detainees present at the military office told a source close to Resident Advisor that some people were subsequently released, while others were kept for up to 24 hours without being able to contact relatives or lawyers.

The police report also states that Jugendhub “operates without any permits,” though a Facebook post by the lawyer working on behalf of the club, Kseniya Prokonova, disputes this, saying that “all the paperwork is fine.” The police report’s claim that the bathrooms “do not work” is also allegedly misleading—eyewitnesses said that the authorities caused the damage themselves, breaking the pipes and kicking cubicle doors.

Since opening in July this year, Jugendhub has hosted regular parties featuring mostly local and Russian house and techno artists. Though the club remains open after the raid, there will be no parties in the near future. (The raided event marked the closing of the current season.) The only event in the diary is a lecture about drug safety, scheduled for this Saturday, November 4th.

Jugendhub isn’t the first Kiev club to be targeted by the authorities—Closer was raided several times in 2015 on suspicion of drug-related activity. More recently in Moscow, staff and punters at Rabitza were violently attacked by police, an incident that led to the club’s subsequent closure.

Nightclubs in the country’s capital have been forced to close amid tightened security measures.

China is cracking down on nightclubs and other music venues during this week’s Communist Party meeting in Beijing.

The country is tightening security as more than 2,000 delegates arrive in China for the Party Congress, which began on Wednesday, October 18th, and runs into next week. Though exact details remain unclear, music venues across the country are being taregeted. In Beijing, it appears as if all nightclubs have been forced to close entirely until next week, a move that’s forced local promoters to cancel events, including a show with DJ Zinc at Dada Beijing that was due to happen on October 21st.

The New York Times reports that President Xi Jinping’s government is targeting not only nightclubs but Airbnb, which has been suspended to “reduce the flow of outsiders to the capital.” The BBC reports that restaurants, gyms and karaoke bars have also been targeted as a result of the congress, which takes place every five years.

The next release on Innervisions is a 12-inch by Portuguese producer Trikk.

Mundo Ritual will be Trikk’s second release on Dixon and Âme’s label, following 2016’s Florista EP. Out on October 13th, the new record sees the Oporto native, real name Bruno Deodato, presenting eight more tracks in his earthy and melodic deep house style. The EP shares its name with a two-part online mix series by Deodato from 2016, which you can stream in full.

Milan techno producer Wrong Assessment is launching his own label called AWRY.

Wrong Assessment says AWRY will highlight his own music as well as that of artists who share his penchant for “deepness, hypnosis and minimalism.” A four-track EP from the label boss, simply titled AWRY001, is up first and expected by late October. Following that one will be a record from Midgar artist Ruhig, with a remix by Sublunar cofounder and Ilian Tape and Black Opal affiliate Sciahri—a release date for that one is still TBA. The label’s output will come on vinyl and digital formats.

AWRY is the next move for Wrong Asessment, an artist who in recent years has put out tracks on imprints including Mord, M_REC, Clergy and Parachute. He also used to collaborate with the late M_REC boss Max_M under the name Overall Severity.

The band will headline the three-day event in July, joined by acts like Floating Points, Call Super and Warpaint.

The xx will bring their Night + Day event series to Iceland’s Skogafoss waterfall from July 14th through 16th.

It’ll be the first time the spectacular site has been used for a music festival. The xx will perform live once, with band member Jamie xx also DJing. They’ll be joined by acts like Floating Points (who will DJ), Sampha, Gilles Peterson, Hunee, Benji B, Avalon Emerson, Warpaint, Kamasi Washington, Call Super and Axel Boman, who will team up with Robag Wruhme as part of a Pampa showcase. Some local artists have also been booked, including Högni, Orang Volante and Trip favourite Bjarki.

The band say they “fell in love” with Iceland during the recording of their latest album, I See You. Since that record’s release, they’ve toured the world and hosted a seven-night residency at London’s Brixton Academy. Read our review of the second Brixton show.

DJ Robert Miles, best known for his trance hit Children, has died at the age of 47 after a short illness.

The Italian musician topped the charts in 12 countries with the track, which was first released in 1995 and reached number two in the UK in 1996.

He also won the Brit Award for best international breakthrough act in 1997. Pete Tong led the tributes to the DJ, who died in Ibiza, tweeting: “Sad to hear Robert Miles passing. RIP, thanks for the music.”

His statement continued: “I remember 1997 Brit Awards Ceremony very well. Robert Miles was the best international newcomer award, introduced by Gary Barlow. Miles was the only one Italian artist winner in BA history. “Children is an instrumental and dance anthem, one of the most ever loved tracks. With Robert Miles a part of my life dies with him.”

Miles was born Roberto Concina in Switzerland on 3 November 1969 to Italian parents.

‘Thanks for the inspiration’

After finding mainstream success with Children, he had two further UK top 10 singles – Fable and One & One – and went on to release five albums. He also launched a Balearic radio station called Open Lab, which played experimental music.

Other figures in the dance music community to pay tribute included Darude, who tweeted: “RIP Robert Miles. Thank you for the inspiration, direction & courage!”

Armin van Buuren said: “Really in shock to hear the news of the passing of Robert Miles,” while Chicane wrote: “I only played ‘Children’ 2 weeks ago on Sun:sets…. I wished I had written it.”

Rhadoo, Raresh and Petre Inspirescu’s label will release the four-track record in May. g!

[a:rpia:r], the label run by Rhadoo, Raresh and Petre Inspirescu, will put out a record from Ricardo Villalobos in May.

With four tracks spread over two vinyl discs, Empirical House will be [a:rpia:r]’s first release in over a year. (It follows the December 2015 release of Parcul Cosmos, the first album from Romania’s Dan Andrei.) Empirical House, which is listed as an album on the ourown distribution website, sees Villalobos in a laid-back and atmospheric mode, delivering four percussive cuts that may sound familiar to anyone who has caught [a:rpia:r]’s founders behind the decks in recent years.

Empirical House is Villalobos’s first solo release on [a:rpia:r], following remixes of DJ Sneak in 2010 and Raresh in 2014. Stream samples at ourown.

He made it “to test out the Poly CV feature” on the Cirklon sequencer.

A new track by Aphex Twin appears in a promotional video for the gear manufacturer Sequentix.

“4xAtlantis take1” plays in the background of a clip that Sequentix uploaded today to YouTube (watch that below). Richard D. James “made it to test out the Poly CV feature on the Cirklon sequencer,” a company representative told Pitchfork today. The track also makes use of Atlantis synthesizer modules—thus the title. It’s the first new Aphex Twin material since last year’s Cheetah EP, which also contains two tracks named after the Cirklon.

First up is is an EP from Bill Converse’s new project, Tide Eman, then a Patricia album co-released with Spectral Sound.

Patricia is preparing to launch his own label, Active Cultures.

The Chicago-born, Brooklyn-based producer has put out solo records on Opal Tapes and Spectral Sound, and worked alongside Matt Morandi (AKA Jahiliyya Fields) as Inhalants, as well as Cloudface as DSR.MR, among other collaborations. Active Cultures, which will release on vinyl and digital formats, “has been slowly brewing for about a year,” he told RA. “The aim is to use the label as a platform to not only give myself more freedom to release my own musical output, but also provide an outlet to friends whose music I want to support.”

A new alias from Bill Converse, Tide Eman, is behind the label’s first record, a five-track EP called Animate Objects that’s due out in May. Next up will be a triple-LP Patricia album co-released with Spectral Sound (details for which are still TBA). Active Cultures’ plans for future releases include archival early ’90s productions from Todd Sines, along with material from a new Morandi project.

Anoosh Raki and Arash Shadram, who DJ as Blade & Beard, said they were “devastated and disappointed” by the decision. “Anoosh’s visa was refused by the UK embassy in Geneva,” say Unleash, who were promoting the event. A spokesperson for the event says Arash, meanwhile, “was not sent a refusal or acceptance letter” meaning he was also unable to enter the UK. They say Arash’s application was submitted with a fast-track service in mid-March, which usually guarantees a response within five working days.

The film they were supposed to be in town to promote, Raving Iran, is a documentary by German filmmaker Susanne Regina Meures about the persecution Anoosh and Arash faced in their home country. A press release calls the film “a chilling insight into the lives of two young men defying the Iranian regime with their love for music.”

“We were so hopeful and extremely excited to visit the United Kingdom and to play for Unleash at Village Underground in London,” Anoosh and Arash said. “We left Iran in the hopes to follow our path as artists, and to finally freely play around the globe. It’s a shame that politics get in the way of art, and freedom, even in such a liberal and democratic country as Great Britain. We would like to apologise for our absence and that we cannot share the passion we have fought for with you this evening, but we will continue following our dreams and hope that one day, in the near future we can visit the UK and showcase our music in such a diverse and wonderful city.” This is the first time the pair had applied for a UK visa.

Unleash shone further light on the situation: “Despite submitting all the necessary documents and adhering to all visa application requirements, Anoosh received a letter from the UK Visas & Immigration team stating that his visa was refused because the authorities were ‘not satisfied that you [Anoosh] are a genuine visitor and will leave the UK at the end of your visit.’ Arash did not receive any response from the embassy; despite our numerous attempts to contact the embassy via telephone, email and post, we still have not received an official rejection letter nor an explanation. We express our sincere condolences to Anoosh and Arash and apologise to all of you that were as excited as we were to welcome them for their UK debut.”

Commune, which is hosting a screening of the film on June 3rd at Rio Cinema in Dalston, released the following statement: “All of us at Commune are gutted about the news of the visa issues for Anoosh and Arash and that they won’t be making their big London debut at Village Underground. Continuing to promote the film in the UK is incredibly important, not only to spread their incredible story, but to help alter the perspective we’re fed in the West of Middle Eastern youth culture—there are lots of young people passionate about dance music in Iran. Hopefully this film can help to weaken the repressive regime they have to suffer.”

Last night’s event still took place, with Amirali stepping in for Blade & Beard.

The 11-track LP, out in June, will be the first release on the US artist’s new label, Lone Romantic.

Maceo Plex has a new album on the way called Solar.

News of the record broke late last year when the US artist, real name Eric Estornel, released Journey To Solar, an LP of club-focussed material written during the same period as Solar. The new album is more varied, spanning electronica, dub, breakbeat and techno. Estornel, who named Solar after his son, says it chronicles his fatherhood, from “the ups and downs in the first few years” to “its effects on life, marriage and more.” It’ll come out on June 16th via Lone Romantic, a new label from Estornel for more leftfield electronic music.